Visitors to the Melbourne Steam Traction Engine Clubs annual Steamfest rally this year are in for a rare treat. The two mighty Fowler Z7 ploughing engines resident at the club’s museum, the ‘National Seam Centre’, have recently been joined by a balance plough, and planning is underway to demonstrate them ploughing together for the first time in nearly 90 years.

The two spectacularly large ploughing engines are a rare set, being a consecutively numbered pair, #15499 and #15500. Ploughing engines were sold in pairs as they were designed to be operated around 400 metres apart, by winching cultivating implements back and forth between them. They have winching gear under their boiler barrels, with a wire rope feeding out  to the left on one of the pair, and to the right on the other. American manufacturers produced huge engines for direct ploughing that were capable of hauling ploughs with up to 30 furrows. However, the Fowler answer was to leave the engines on opposite edges of the field and to winch the ploughs, relatively rapidly, across the ground between the pair.