S.A. Rail & Habour Company

September 1, 2009

Chris from South Africa send in his memories of working on the Railways:

I’m from South Africa and work 31 years for the S.A. Rail & Habour company. Although I work in the clerical departments I’ve also work for 6 years on various stations, where I had to attend the load & offload of traffic from goods trains. These trains were steam, electrical and diesel engines with trucks from hopper, parcels, grain, farm animals, mass load etc. I’ve also deal with mainline & suburb passenger trains.

In the early years of the rail road service to and from Cape town the train (steam/diesel) had to zigzag on a single rail from the bottom to the top of a mountain (visa versa) before continue to the north/south of the country. In later years they changed this route only for tourist. Ever since this route has been closed.