A regenerative braking energy recovery strategy based on pontryagin's minimum principle (PMP) for Fuel Cell (FC)/Supercapacitor (SC) hybrid power locomotive was proposed in this paper. In the proposed strategy, the dynamic coefficient a is used in PMP during the traction state of the locomotive, which makes system transient hydrogen consumption minimum. What's more, during locomotives brake state, according to the known parameters of SCs and operation indicators, an optimized braking speed curve can also be obtained which has maximum brake recovery rate. The results are obtained from RT-LAB platform testify that the proposed strategy is able to maximize SC absorption braking energy, and the energy recovery rate improves and maintains SC state of charge (SoC) in a reasonable and safe range, and decreases brake resistors energy consumption in the braking process. (C) 2018 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.