As part of their African Collage journey, which is over 3700km by rail, and extends over 12 days winding its way from Pretoria to Cape Town, a group of 48 Rovos Rail guests visited Sandstone last week for a Walking Tour of the Heritage Collection and a steam train ride to Grootdraai. The 1958 built Class NGG16 Garratt locomotive, number 153, hauled the special train which was made up as a mixed train of goods wagons and passenger coaches much to the delight of the guests.

This book can easily be considered the definitive work on the South African railway system (including Namibia) and its sheer size and comprehensive content defy belief at times. At 426 pages, with a comprehensive and extensive selection of colour and black and white pictures, author Jean Dulez has excelled all expectations on such a definitive book. In reality the book is an update of a previous one, “Railways of Southern Africa 150” by the same author published in 2011 for the  150^th anniversary of the railway in South Africa from 1850 to 2010. That book was developed from an original proposed book by the late Dusty Durrant that never came to fruition.

Lawrence Gross, who hails from the USA, is a rail enthusiast who also runs a successful Transport Consultancy service based in Durango, Colorado. Mr Gross visited Sandstone in  July 2023. He recently sent us one of his photographs from Sandstone that he used for his Picture of the Day on his company website (see: https://intermodalindepth.com/pictures-of-the-day/ )

We receive many pictures of Sandstone but we believe that this shot, from Mr Gross, of Sandstone’s NG15 number 17, at dawn, is very special so we are sharing it with you. Our thanks to Lawrence Grossman and enjoy!

After a successful engine rebuild the Dodge moved under its own power for the first time in over 20 years. Enjoy the read and video of the Dodge on the move.