Rob Steiger's SAR GEA in 5gge

Rob Steiger started building his GEA in 2002 from original SAR drawings and worked feverishly on it, as we all know Rob to do, producing parts to show off every week. He machined all 16 spoked drivers by hand and had a rolling chassis by the time of the National Live Steam Meet in Pietermaritzburg in 2003. 

After this the locomotive production virtually closed down, but only for a short while to make space for track building. Once the track was completed and the grand opening of the Albert Falls Miniature Railway was held, Rob got back to the business of making sworf. 

Because of the layout of the Garratt cab, firing with coal would prove very difficult and so Rob converted it to oil fired. Now in South Africa were coal can just about be found at your local chemist, model engineers around here never looked into firing with anything other than coal. This case is somewhat different from the USA, one hardly ever sees coal fired locomotives there, so someone must have perfected the art of turning oil into steam, also making the driver/fireman’s’ job a bit easier. 

Finding this information proved a bit tougher than expected, as even the mighty Google could not beat oil out of the internet, so he made his own version. And here it is: