It has a few miles on the clock now, but it remains one of the great models of the last decade. Steve Baldock’s Richard Hornsby chain steam tractor is built to 1:3 scale and occupied some 7000 hours over an eight year period.

It is different. It is stunning.

The model weighs in at 1.3 tons, and works at 170psi. The engine is a compound and gears provide no less than eight speeds.

The model is of a tractor adapted to work in the extreme climate of the Yukon at the height of the Gold Rush. Dawson, by then a thriving City, relied on coal supplies from a mine 44 miles away at Coal Creek, and the Hornsby was ordered for that task. Loads were 100 tons.

Normally these tractors were fitted with internal combustion engines and one of these can be seen at the Bovington Tank Museum in Dorset (highly recommended). In the Yukon, coal was readily available and so the tractor was fitted with a Foster boiler, cylinder and motion package, making it unique. It was completed in 1910.

The engine worked for just three years, before hydro-electric power came to Dawson and the mine closed. Later it was moved to Vancouver Island for timber haulage for a while. After that, the boiler was removed to be used for heating worker accommodation, and after a fire was scrapped.

Surprisingly the Hornsby chain track part of the machine survived for some decades on Vancouver Island, and its remains are there to this day, efforts to have it returned to England for restoration having failed. Meanwhile, the model exists as a reminder of exciting times in Alaska.