A steam road roller at Birla Industrial and Technological Museum in Calcutta

Siliguri, April 29: A UK-based association has started a campaign to spread awareness on the steam road rollers in India, which was the first country to have a fully-operational road roller in 1863.

“We have begun by gathering as much information as we can about Indian road rollers,” Derek A. Rayner, the vice-chairman of the Road Roller Association, said. “We have asked the association members, steam-lovers in the UK and our contacts in India to help us in the task.”

“We would like people to know that steam rollers do exist in India. Rollers are important from a historical point of view since they were used to make and improve many of the roads in India,” Rayner, technical adviser to the Old Glory magazine, told The Telegraph in an email from York, England.

The latest drive comes after Rayner identified the Aveling & Porter machine on the PWD complex at Malbazar, 52km from Siliguri. Rayner chanced upon the steam roller when he was in Siliguri in January 2007 with wife Dorothy. “I immediately recognised that it was a very old machine dating back to the 1890s and of the Aveling & Porter’s R 10 type. I did not that these existed in India,” said Rayner. He himself is the proud owner of a 1915-built Aveling & Porter steam roller called White Rose. He has had it since 1964

Rayner found that the number plate had only three digits, 226, instead of the usual four and began investigating the origin of the road roller once he got back to the UK.

Rayner found that no less than 14 steam rollers were sent to India in 1944 for road repair and they were all of the Aveling & Porter R10 type built in the early 1890s. “I subsequently checked the respective boiler numbers in the records hoping that one of them may be something like the one found at Malbazar — namely 226,” Rayner said.

It was found that of the 14 rollers, one’s number was 2226. Rayner noted that its features matched with the roller he found in Malbazar. He is thus confident that a mistake was made when stamping the roller’s boiler and it should have been 2226 — not 226.

After a thorough research, Rayner concluded: “The roller at Malbazar is Aveling & Porter No 3569, which was new to the London firm of A & H Rutty of Bromley by Bow and was dispatched from Rochester, Kent, on July 17, 1895. It eventually became Barnes Bros Fleet No. 26.” Rayner will publish his findings soon.

Rayner is now trying to find out where the other thirteen steam rollers from this batch of fourteen that came to India in 1944 are. “Have they all been scrapped?”

So far 10 steam road rollers have been identified in India — two in Siliguri, one at Malbazar, one at Cooch Behar, four in Calcutta and two (derelict ones) in Gujarat.