Welcome to the Sandstone Estates website! Click on “About Us” to learn more about Sandstone and the Heritage collection.
Please note  we do not accept cash payments at Sandstone, only Debit Cards, Credit Cards, EFT payments & mobile application payments.

Recently a classic BM Volvo 600 tractor was donated to Sandstone by a farmer in the Memel district of the Free State in South Africa.

 The Sandstone Steam Railway stock list has been updated, click here to read.

With our limited events during and after the Covid pandemic, coverage of Sandstone in international magazines has been less than we previously enjoyed. So we were pleased to see that Vintage Sprit magazine covered our Easter event with a letter from contributor, Peter Brockington.

You can access details of Vintage Spirit, which covers Steam and Industrial Heritage, on the following link.

Vintage Spirit Magazine | Steam Heritage

Although Covid is no longer an issue, we were obviously unable to host the number of events that we normally would have held at Sandstone Estates over the past few years.  However, the demand is returning and we did have a successful Easter Festival. 

Our next event will be the Cherry Steam Festival which has always been well attended. We will again be partnering with a number of local attractions as in 2021. The Cherry Steam Festival will run from Friday 18^th November to Saturday 19^th November 2022. - Click here to view full details and how to book

We recently featured, on the 19^th May, the presentation of a large Skoda works plate by Svatopluk (Sváťa) Šlechta  from The Czech Republic. Sváťa has now sent us the full history of the plate and pictures of the two locomotives that carried the plate during their service in the former Czechoslovakia. Click here to read the story.

Recent weather events at Sandstone Estates led to a unique harvesting approach for the Soya crop from way back in time. Click here to read more

One of Sandstone’s long time European supporters is Svatopluk Slechta, an engineer from the Czech Republic and a great rail enthusiast. He has visited Sandstone many times on his tours of South Africa, most recently at our Easter Steam Festival. We were pleased and honoured to be presented with a brass Skoda works plate by him. Today most people imagine that Skoda, founded in 1859 by Emil Skoda, just made cars but, in years gone by, they also built many steam locomotives including a batch of South African Railways (SAR) 19D class. To this day they are still in the rail transportation arena producing trams and propulsion units for trolleybuses, albeit now a separate company from the car manufacturing arm.

Svata, as he is known, is also currently writing a book on the history of Skoda steam locomotives and was looking for assistance in obtaining pictures of the fifteen Skoda built 19D locomotives. These were manufactured in 1938 and carried SAR numbers 2626 to 2640. Three examples survive today of which number 2633 is plinthed at Sandstone. This was sold by the SAR in the 1980s to become Sappi No. 2. It was donated to Sandstone in 2019.

Through our connections with railway photographers, both in South Africa and overseas, we were able to obtain a large number of photographs of Skoda 19Ds in service in South Africa. Sandstone’s thanks Svata, for his generosity and wishes him well with his new book.

Our gallery shows the presentation of the Skoda plate to Sandstone, L to R, Mike Myers and Dave Richardson from Sandstone and Svata Slechta.

Our second picture shows Skoda built 19D number 2633 plinthed at Sandstone.

Sandstone has two of these fascinating steam powered drilling machines. Both are with a restorer in the Western Cape where it is hoped to build one out of two. Click here to read the full story.