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A sprawling Free State farm returned to the steam age last week.
Garratts slumber in the smoky Sandstone engine shed
Twenty-two restored steam locomotives were fired-up and spent the week hauling trains on the 26km-long narrow gauge railway that picks its way through the maize fields and under the sandstone buttresses on Sandstone Estates near Ficksburg. Read More…
I hopped a couple of South African freight trains and discovered that all things are not equal on Transnet’s tracks.
6.30am, Voorbaai rail yard DAN Pienaar, driver of 1174, the weekday freight from Mossel Bay to Worcester, is champing at the bit. It’s going to be hot and, with a pair of ailing 46-year-old diesels up front, who knows what trials the day may bring. Read More…
Railways, as an American railroad entrepreneur I know often reminds me, are, like UFO sightings, a stealth industry. Read More…
This is a transcript of the interview between Transnet acting CEO Chris Wells and Business Times on the railway company’s decision to concession some 7 000km of branch lines to private operators.
BUSINESS TIMES: Let’s get right to it. This move to concession the branch lines is revolutionary. How did it come about? Read More…
The UK High Court has outlawed the imminent strikes planned by BA’s cabin crew union. Read More…
If you’ve ever wanted to own your own steam locomotives – and the railway to run them on – your time has come. Read More…
Trying to make rail tourism really work in this country is not a job any sane person would want, surely? Certainly not when years of begging letters, meetings, deputations and entreaties are reduced to nothing but dust when an irreplaceable piece of rail history and once-viable tourism asset is turned into scrap? Read More…
It’s been an entertaining week for the London Underground, what with all the broohaha over the central planners dumping the River Thames from the Tube map and then Lord Mayor Boris Johnson ordering them to put it back.
While this was all going down, so to speak, The Telegraph has been having a bit of fun by collecting all the alternative Tube maps , ranging from maps that show which stations have toilets (above) to one in which curses and filthy invective replace the original station names. There’s one of anagrams and another which shows you where it would be quicker to walk.
One of the best, though, is how the map would have looked if Germany had won the war (and not just the peace).
Boris Johnson has ordered Transport for London to put the River Thames back on the map of the London Underground when the new maps are printed at the end of the year.
Johnson, who came back from the US to a furore after transport planners dropped the river and zone information from the new maps to make them less cluttered, said on the London mayoral Twitter feed: “Can’t believe that the Thames disappeared off the tube map whilst I was out the country! It will be reinstated…”
According to The Telegraph, TfL confirmed that the river would re-appear on the next batch of maps but that the organisation remianed “committed” to de-cluttering the map.
PHOTO: www.citizen.org.uk
Take a look at these two photos. The first shows the railway dining car “Protea” on a fast express back in the day when dining cars were the centrepiece of South Africa’s crack passenger trains.
The second shows her as she is today, lying stripped, vandalised and dumped on a siding in Cape Town where Transnet’s “heritage” operation keeps its historic – and previously valuable – coaches. Read More…
