Locomotives International

I visited Indonesia as part of a group in May 1977. The originality of the programme was that a major part of transportation in Java was by train. In addition I was able to take free time to visit some places of interest for a railway fan. Everywhere we were granted a friendly welcome and everyone did his best to fulfill all our wishes. I was invited in the cab of the diesel locomotive all along the section from Jakarta and Bandung. In Bandung, I was able to visit the locomotive workshop which was very interesting in spite of difficult communication, none of the railwaymen present being able to speak more than few words of English. The programme stated that we would travel twice in a special air-conditioned coach included…

Readers will almost certainly know about the history of how Berlin evolved after 1945, but a very brief summary. The city was divided into four sectors: British, French, US and Soviet. The first three then became ‘West Berlin’ and the Soviet sector ‘East Berlin’. During the early period, there was the famous ‘Berlin Airlift’ for eleven months in 1948/49, when land connections to West Berlin were severed by the Soviets before matters returned to normal. But later, overnight on 12/13th August 1961, a barbed wire fence went up around West Berlin, effectively making it an island within East Germany (DDR). This fence soon became a much greater barrier, involving a mixture of high walls and/or fences, mines, self firing guns, dogs and frequent watchtowers with armed guards. Known officially in…

From Sudan Notes and Records Vol. 20, No. 1 (1937), pp. 107-124. The building of this extraordinary fragment of a railway and its abandonment in the face of the enemy after only twenty miles of track had been laid was one of the minor incidents of the Anglo-Egyptian campaign against the Mahdi. Yet this incident cost the British Treasury close on a million pounds. Its merits and its folly were fiercely debated in Parliament and it was one of the principal causes which brought Mr. Gladstone’s Second Administration to its fall. The project of a railway connecting Suakin with some point on the Nile was not new in 1885. A succession of travellers over the route had recommended it. The project had already been considered by the Egyptian Government and…

An apparent almost binding rule in Chilean State Railways (EFE) locomotive policy was that no type of locomotive should have driving wheels of a diameter greater than 5´6”, which, by coincidence, was the gauge of the Southern Network (RS) main line and of many of its branches. There was not really much point in having bigger wheels, since most of the main lines were single tracked and occupied by both fast and slow passenger trains and even slower freight trains, all worked in both directions. There were two exceptions to the rule, one of which is the subject of this article and the other of which is mentioned herein. For the line from Santiago westwards to Valparaíso (FCSV), the prevailing management preferred locomotives and hauled rolling stock of British manufacture…

In looking at the history of this town and its railways, it is necessary to go back to the early to mid-Victorian era. The town area was surveyed by John Turnbull Thomson in 1858 and grew into the attractive colonial style town that we know today and was settled by Europeans over the following decades of those Victorian times. A lot of the town had been built by the mid-1880s and in the previous years had also seen a major port built between the years 1871 and 1884, (which didn’t cease commercial shipping operations until 1974); additionally, the South Island Main Trunk (SIMT) railway line opened in a northerly direction to Christchurch on 1st February 1877. Oamaru’s first station was opened in 1876 and the site of this station is…

Contributions for this section should be sent to the Editorial Office, with the following exceptions: • Southern Africa - John Middleton, c/o Editorial Office. Email: johnmiddleton3401@gmail.com • South America - Lionel Price, 9, Liverpool Road West, Oswestry, Shropshire, SY11 1PE. Email: jldprice@btinternet.com • Spain & Portugal - Joan Carles Salmerón, c/o Editorial Office. Email: cet@terminus.cat Contributions which are primarily photographic in nature should all be sent to the Editorial Office to give the best choice of material for covers etc. Similarly historical articles and features should be sent to the Editor. The Editor’s contact details are inside the front cover AFRICA SOUTH AFRICA State Capture Commission The commission began its work in August 2017 looking into the wide ranging allegations of corruption across various sectors but including Transnet and PRASA.…