Trouble connecting through SSH tunnel to Droplet

I have an SSH tunneling scheme which works on my local cluster but has connection failures when I try to use it on my Ubuntu droplet. I set up the tunnel in SSH from my local machine like this:

ssh -L 12003:127.0.0.1:12003 NYTrader -N

NYTrader is defined in my config with the droplet IP and user root. That command works apparently - from my droplet:

root@NYTrader:~# ss -tuln
Netid      State       Recv-Q      Send-Q           Local Address:Port              Peer Address:Port      Process
udp        UNCONN      0           0                   127.0.0.54:53                     0.0.0.0:*
udp        UNCONN      0           0                127.0.0.53%lo:53                     0.0.0.0:*
tcp        LISTEN      0           4096             127.0.0.53%lo:53                     0.0.0.0:*
tcp        LISTEN      0           4096                127.0.0.54:53                     0.0.0.0:*
tcp        LISTEN      0           1                      0.0.0.0:12003                  0.0.0.0:*
tcp        LISTEN      0           4096                         *:22                           *:*
root@NYTrader:~#

I have a script on the droplet sending characters every 2 seconds on 12003.

From my local PC:

 telnet 127.0.0.1 12003
Trying 127.0.0.1...
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused

Why is this connection refused? The tunnel appears to be up?