What is royalty without some extravagance !!! This sentence perfectly seems to reflect the lifestyle of Maharaja Pratapsinhrao Gaekwad of Baroda. In an incident reflecting this extravagance, the Maharaja gifted his children a working scaled down model of the Flying Scotsman.
Set up in 1941 on the grounds of the Lukshmi Vilas Palace, this train used to ferry the royal children from the palace to their school also situated on the place grounds. A special 3 KM long mini railway track was laid on the Palace ground which led to the school building (now houses the Maharaja Fatesingh Museum). The track started from the palace then went on to the Princes School, and then circled the Palace orchards before returning to the palace again.
The Train:
Built by Mr. Bullock, the owner of Surrey Border & Camberley Railway (SB&CR) in 1936. This Locomotive was a Scale model of LNER Gresley A3 class Pacific (the London & North Eastern railway) and initially named Harvester. The little train had 3 compartments with a sitting capacity of about 30 children.
In 1956 the Royal family gifted this Train to the Children of Baroda. The Vadodara Municipal Corporation (VMC) transferred the tracks earlier laid in the Palace Campus to the Sayaji Baug Public Park so that they could run joy rides for the children. In 1993 the boiler of the steam engine got destroyed and hence the original engine was retired to a shed.
On May 15, 2001, the original toy steam engine, The Flying Scotsman, was returned to its original home, the Palace Compound. The engine has now been restored and the people can come to the Maharaja Fatesingh Museum to behold one of the Worlds’s Smallest Locomotive Steam Engines!!!!
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