Taken 28/02/24 at the London Transport Museum and I guess museum snaps are always going to be cluttered!
No.23 was built by Beyer Peacock in 1866 and not withdrawn until 1948, by which time it had passed to London Transport and renumbered L45 and had been retained for hauling maintenance trains. When I was a nipper this loco was displayed at the now closed Clapham Transport Museum.
Taken 28/02/24 at the London Transport Museum, Covent Garden; one solution to cluttered and cramped museum snaps, go for the close up!
Taken 28/02/24 at the London Transport Museum, Covent Garden; and if you can get a people free snap, the angle is too tight, there's that odd plastic sheet to contends with (do people really kick locos) and then there is the random glare!
A view of the inside of ex-Metropolitan Railway Metropolitan-Vickers Electric Loco No. 5 'John Hampden' taken on 28/02/24 at the London Transport Museum, Covent Garden
Taken 28/02/24; Uploading the previous snaps of No. 23 I find it hard to visualise regular steam worked services on the UndergrounD. I also struggle with the notion that, in my lifetime (well just about), loco hauled services were a feature on the Metropolitan Line. However, up until the the Amersham electrification in 1961, the 20 locos built by Metropolitan-Vickers in 1922-3 worked services as far as Rickmansworth, where a steam loco took over.
Two of the class survive; No. 5 ‘John Hampden’ seen here in the London Transport Museum at Covent Garden and No. 12 ‘Sarah Siddons’, which has been preserved in operational condition. No. 5 owes its survival to becoming the Acton Works shunter after its passenger duties ended. On final withdrwal it was restored for the London Transport Collection at Syon Park in Brentford in 1973. It has been on display here at London Transport Museum since 1980, when the Covent Garden site opened.
Finally who was John Hampden? Over to Wikipedia, Hampden (1595 – 1643) "... was an English landowner and politician whose opposition to 'arbitrary' taxes imposed by Charles I made him a national figure. Allied with Parliamentarian leader John Pym, and cousin to Oliver Cromwell, he was among the Five Members whose attempted arrest in January 1642 helped to spark the First English Civil War."