Back in 1993, Old Glory published a photograph of what was then described as ‘an old railway locomotive with three wheels missing’ - a relic that had been recovered from an opencast coal mine near Tunstall, Stoke on Trent, Staffordshire. The photograph was identified by a young enthusiast, Paul Rowell, as the part-remains of the earliest Aveling & Porter engine then known to exist.

The engine was situated where the arrow is marked. DAVID VIEWING

Paul’s discovery led to these remains - which consisted of the cylinder, motion, flywheel and part of the boiler top - being exhibited at rallies later that year and, since it was Aveling year, this included the Great Dorset Steam Fair where it created a considerable amount of attention.

One of the original photos which appeared in Old Glory No. 87 of May 1997 showing members of Anthony Coulls’ Industrial Archeological Field Trip inspecting the remains of the engine at Cwt-y-Bugail quarry in December 1996. Note the rectangular blast pipe aperture, typical of early Aveling engines, and the four holes where the missing cylinder mounting bolts were once located, indicating a 10hp (or above) engine. Two studs part-way down the boiler on each side showed the engine once carried a belly tank. ANTHONY COULLS

The engine also became one of the first to be written up on the Internet and, as a result, it attracted attention from around the world. The engine was given the title of the ‘Steam Dinosaur’ because of its age and the fact that it was found quite by chance, buried 200ft below ground in the galleries of a flooded Victorian coal mine. Indeed, the old engine had been underwater longer than that most famous of ships, the Titanic!
Despite the perfect preservation of all the non-ferrous parts normally robbed from scrapped engines, no numbers were found and identification was made through painstaking research into contemporary documents. The engine had been stripped of all running gear when it was installed in the mine as a winding engine and because so much of it was missing, the possibility existed at that time that it could have been a traction engine, railway engine or even an early ‘Batho’ design of steamroller - because Aveling had used common parts in all of these designs. Slowly, a picture built up that confirmed the engine to be a traction tram locomotive of about 1865 - very similar to that shown on page 72 of the last issue - and a fascinating image emerged of the engine’s duties towards the end of its working life. It was installed at Turnhurst Hall, the family home of canal builder James Brindley, to work an incline up from the nearby Potteries loop line to a coal mine in the grounds of the hall. This incline can still be seen today, although Turnhurst Hall was sadly demolished in the 1920s. The hall is still famous as the supposed site of Brindley’s ‘model locks’ which had allowed him to revolutionise the canal system of the time. The incline which the engine worked might well have been built on the actual site of his model locks. Later, and perhaps with its boiler worn out, the old engine was sold and moved about a mile distant along the pit railway to the adjacent Victoria Colliery, where it was stripped of its chassis, tender and firebox. Here, it was lowered down a shaft and placed in a brick building far underground and fed with compressed air from the surface in order to wind tubs along an underground incline.
In that dark location the remains would have stayed, many feet below the surface, had it not been for a decision to opencast the area and the engine’s subsequent release from its burial chamber. It took a lucky break of a rainy afternoon that brought work to a halt and thus gave the modern opencast miners time to drag the ancient machine to the surface - and then Paul Rowell’s later powers of observation to recognise it for what it really was.