Graveyard of the Steam Giants 1983

Steam motive power and operations in Southern Africa
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John Ashworth
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Graveyard of the Steam Giants 1983

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Lee Gates wrote:Attached to this email is a little treat that was forwarded to our friend, John Eales, at the South East Humid Coast. Said treat is an article called ‘Graveyard of the Steam Giants.’ It was written back in 1983 and describes the initial retiring of elderly steam traction at De AAR and describes the formation of the deadlines and the ‘strategic storage’ of retired steam locomotives that was characteristic of the declining years of steam in an increasingly isolated apartheid-era South Africa. As many of us now know, many of the steam locomotives in long term ‘strategic storage’ decayed so badly that they were eventually scrapped anyway.

‘Graveyard of the Steam Giants’ also describes De Aar itself and concisely describes the challenges of running steam in such a terrain.

The article was written by Jenny Hobbs for the Sunday Times Magazine and it was written from the point of view of a freelance journalist and not a railway expert. She was inspired to write this piece after a visit to the De Aar workshops – so this is actually an eye witness account. I contacted Jenny Hobbs this evening and she kindly gave me permission to distribute her article to the Reefsteamers lists. (With the aforementioned proviso.)

Jenny is obviously pleased to hear that steam locomotives are still running nearly 30 years on, even though the devastation that she predicted did eventually happen.

A journalist could see the Grim Creaker coming in 1983. In increasingly difficult times, it makes what Reefsteamers (and other bands of steam nuts) have achieved and managed to save even more special and worthy of fighting for.

Thanks, Jenny!
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