The Table Bay yard was a reception and dispatching yard for all goods traffic to and from the harbour, where road engines came in or departed with heavy goods trains. Although I saw a few electric locos ('draadkarre' in Afrikaans), steam was the rule. The road engines here were almost exclusively mixed-traffic 4-8-2s, generally 19Cs and 14CRs. The 19Cs appeared both with conventional and 'torpedo' tenders. One dark and damp evening, I went to have a look.
Read on:
A visit to the Paardeneiland shed
One Sunday afternoon I had an invitation by one of the shunting drivers, to come and see the Paardeneiland running shed and adjoining Salt River Works. This was the first big steam shed I had been in, and both rigid frame and Garratt locos were standing inside. A great variety of engines were there, GEA class Garratts, class 24 2-8-4 branchline locos, the ubiquitous 19Cs and 14CRs and one or two 15Fs which were described as 'een baie vinnige enjin' (a very fast loco).
photos:
Read on:
Video:
Port Elizabeth Sunset
(And tales of East London)
At Port Elizabeth the railway yard layout is quite different from that at Cape Town. A cramped shunting yard extends along the sea from the main station. This services the harbour sidings, and branches extend around the harbour and to the narrow gauge exchange yard at Humewood Road, where the 2ft gauge Avontuur railway terminates. When I revisited P.E. in 1976 the shunting yard was being reconstructed as a container terminal was being built outside the old sea wall, but in '74 things were still untouched. At the seaward end of the yard were two tiny water tanks and an ash pit to service the shunting locos.
I didn't come to East London till 1976. Railway operations here were marked by the harbour yards being deep down between the hills surrounding the Buffalo River. Late that evening in November 1976 I went ashore with my cassette recorder and made the best sound recordings ever, with the big 14CR loco being thrashed up and down the narrow yard along the quay, collecting the empty gondolas that had been used to bring out the copper to our ship. During a pause in operations, in the still night air, in the distance one could distinctly hear a train labouring up the steep incline from the river yard towards East London main station. The next day I visited the loco depot.
Read on:
Video:
Swansong of the Reid Tenwheeler
Durban harbour is a former lagoon, the Bay of Natal, with a narrow entrance. The Southern side of this is formed by a low narrow hill range called The Bluff. According to the chart, on the seaward side there used to be a whaling station, with a railway line continuing towards it right around the headland. On the lagoon side there was a great coal loader where entire bogie coal wagons were picked up, hoisted in the air and turned upside down.
Here I saw three H1/H2 class 4-8-2 tank engines at work, whilst during my time there a 14R class loco came in with a coal train. The number isn't very clear from the photo which is slightly blurred, but it seems to be no. 1705. The tank locos were ex-Natal Government Railway locos built as 4-10-2Ts by Dübs at Glasgow in 1901-3, when a Mr G.W.Reid was the NGR's CME. Hence these locos, built for the grades to Pietermaritzburg, were called the 'Reid Tenwheelers'.
Read on:
Day trip to Loerie
Early one Saturday morning in November 1976, I departed from Humewood Road station in Port Elizabeth, on the 'Apple Express'. At the head of the 8-coach train was NG118, a NG15 class 2-8-2 tender loco. We had no time to look at the loco as the train took off without delay. First we climbed stiffly out of the terminus and skirted an old quarry, at the bottom of which was a maze of narrow gauge track, and then we passed through pleasant suburbs before coming out into the country. Here the loco unsettled the horse of a young rider who promptly was thrown, scrambled to his feet and made us a very international gesture… It didn't take the train long to reach Chelsea station, where an industrial branch swings off to the right.
Read on:
Video:
After Independence
A visit to Mozambique in 1976.
Before independence, Mozambique was very much run as a Portuguese province. I never visited Lourenço Marques then, but to all accounts it seems to have been a rather uproarious place when compared to the stern, Calvinist South Africa of the period, rather like the Las Vegas of Southern Africa.
Just behind the dock area was the main railway station and an extensive marshalling yard, which was very much in contrast to the ones at Cape Town or Port Elizabeth. After ten years of warfare and the emigration of many Portuguese settlers during the war, inevitably the economy of Mozambique was in a bad state. This was reflected in the state of the railway: most of the track was badly maintained, kinky and overgrown although the main line points were worked electrically. The goods stock that was in use was mainly from South Africa, Rhodesia and Zambia and much of the original stock was decrepit.
The locos that worked the harbour sidings however were generally in a run-down state, but quite interesting nonetheless. I only saw three types of locomotive in the shunting yard: an 0-10-0T (nrs 69, 64, 62) by Henschel dating from 1931-37, a beautiful old Baldwin 2-10-2 tender loco of 1917 and a poor old South African 15BR class 4-8-2 numbered CFM no.427 (I think) that soldiered on desperately with a leaking cylinder cover and smashed cab steps.
Read on:
.
