The Underground’s Unlikeliest ‘Ghost’

As an author and Doctor of transport history, I have the pleasure of assisting London Transport Museum as a volunteer, helping present objects and their history to the public. In a previous blog, I introduced the initial use of steam power on the Metropolitan Railway. The major problem of smoke in the tunnels was anticipated by the new line’s Chief Engineer, John Fowler. His attempts at a solution would lead to one of the few confirmed ‘hauntings’ on the Underground…

Fowler’s unusual new ‘fireless’ engine, designed to pull trains without making smoke, was first proposed in 1855, long before the railway was built. The idea was simple: on the surface it could run like any other engine, but in tunnels the fire could be reduced, with the residual heat from firebricks lining the boiler continuing to create steam.

Tests were run on the Great Western Railway (GWR) near Hanwell in 1861, but the engine quickly revealed major problems. Another test was undertaken on the Metropolitan at Edgware Road Station in 1862, with passengers, and had similar results. After this the locomotive was abandoned. It was sold in 1865 and eventually scrapped. The Met opened with its carriages pulled by GWR locomotives. Fowler subsequently designed the more conventional ‘A Class’ locomotives, one of which is preserved at the Museum in Covent Garden.

The story has a twist though. A well-respected engineer, Fowler was clearly so embarrassed at its failure that he avoided any reference to its existence. Silence was maintained until a paper by Fowler’s Metropolitan Railway colleague Sir Benjamin Baker was published in 1885. A 1901 article in The Railway Magazine confused matters by including a drawing for an entirely different ‘fireless’ saddle tank engine, providing it with a nickname that has lived on: ‘Fowler’s Ghost’.

Partially due to this secrecy, little engineering detail is known about the locomotive. Most diagrams post-date the actual engine. Only one photograph exists, authenticated by historians including the famed C Hamilton Ellis, who aptly summarised its failings as being ‘that her boiler not only refrained from producing smoke, it produced very little steam either’! The engine also appears in the background of two further contemporary images – a tantalising glimpse. One day hopefully more may be found of Fowler’s elusive ‘ghost’.