Review: Vivien Horler

On the Railway – The great South African Train Story, by David Williams (Tafelberg)

David Williams, a former deputy editor of the Financial Mail, has written books on topics ranging from sport to  the SA army to biography, but On the Railway feels like the one he was born to write.

He describes how, as a five-year-old in Estcourt in Natal, where his father was a railways electrician, he would wake before dawn in the family home beside the shunting yard, and watch as shunters used a big black steam engine to break up a goods train, separate the trucks and re-assemble them into new trains.

“I go to the window every morning when it is still dark and watch until the sun is well up in the sky. Every morning is the same, yet every morning is different, endlessly interesting.”

Steam power was magic to young David. Before he started school his grandad gave him The Horizon Book of Railways, whose illustrations he pored over, and which he was desperate to learn to read.

As a railway electrician, David’s father was entitled to an annual free pass to take his family to “any station in the Union” and back, as long as the journey was unbroken in both directions.

Williams recalls a trip to Cape Town as a young boy aboard the Orange Express, a train which in the early stage of the journey was pulled by two great 5E electric units. But then in the night, while David was fast asleep. “…I woke and heard a steam engine, hammering and hissing through the night… Once I lifted the corner of the blind as we rounded a sharp curve, and saw up head the fierce, frightening, molten orange glare of the lomotive’s firebox.”

They had a great holiday in Cape Town, but David couldn’t wait to be back on that giant train, thundering through the night.

There are details about long-distance train travel former passengers will remember fondly; the green leather bolsters in the second class compartments, the bed made up for you every night, the steward coming round in the mornings with tea and coffee.

For three years as a student in Grahamstown I took the train to and from Cape Town at the beginning and end of each term. Once I smuggled a kitten all the way from Grahamstown to Durban, and then back from Durban to Cape Town, hiding it from the conductor and refilling the cat litter tray with sand from the fire buckets at the station platforms.

Williams was so enchanted by train travel that after the army and university he got a job as a steward, and describes the rigid hierarchies of the service, the gleaming silver hotel-plate utensils in the dining car, and the skill involved in carrying six loaded dinner plates without spilling anything as the train moved and jerked beneath his feet.

To his delight, his first journey as crew was aboard the South-Wester, which travelled from Johannesburg via De Aar to Windhoek, taking two full days days and nights to get there and another two days and nights back – the longest round trip offered by the SA Railways.

But this book is not just about nostalgia. It goes into a lot of the technicalities of steam power and locomotives and how they work, fireboxes and the hierarchies of the footplate.

It reminds us the isiZulu word for a railway steam engine is stimela, partly derived from the English word “steam”, and repeats a translated quotation from a group of Zulus, newly confronted by a train: “It is a strange beast. Its belly is full of fire and vapour; they feed it with water and wood logs. It is like a rhinoceros, but it blows smoke and sparks through its horn.”

The railways opened up the colonies and countries that became a united South Africa – and Botswana and Zimbabwe. Cape Town was linked to Johannesburg in 1892, just six years after gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand (a journey taken by my great grandmother, granny and great-aunt). This meant all the heavy mining equipment could now travel by rail instead of the vastly slower and inefficient ox wagon transport.

In addition, food could be taken to the Witwatersrand to feed the increasing number of Uitlanders as well as the African miners, who were brought to Johannesburg by rail – in vastly inferior accommodation to that reserved for whites.

Which brings us to the chapter sub-headed “separate and not equal”.

The SA Railways & Harbours was one of the world’s great rail systems, bigger than all other African railways combined. But there was a darker side: “From 1910 [the year of union] up to World War II, the SAR&H always reflected the racial practices of the country. It then became an active servant of government polices that were executed, with great enthusiasm and increasing rigidity, between 1948 and about 1980.”

Dining cars were not provided for black travellers. Black miners travelled on trains known as Bombelas – meaning to crowd or pack.

A senior SAR civil engineer, Charles Lewis, recalled for Williams experiences in the dining car: “… when, seemingly inevitably, a Bombela would draw in alongside when we were enjoying dinner or breakfast. It felt as if eyes were following each forkful from the plate to one’s mouth.”

Williams quotes an editor of the Rand Daily Mail remarking, in 1906, that “however Christian it is to love black people, whites generally find this is much easier if they are seated in another carriage”.

Generally white workers on the railways had the senior and skilled jobs while blacks were labourers (who did not get any of the benefits of even low-skilled whites). There was as an exception to this: the bedding attendants on long-distance passenger were, for some reason, always coloured.

In 1975, the lounge of White Train, which had carried the British royal family around South Africa in 1947, was parked on the bridge over the Victoria Falls for negotiations between Rhodesia’s Ian Smith, Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda and SA’s John Vorster. Williams comments: “Kaunda was almost certainly the first black person… to sit in the White Train lounge car.”

The last chapter, Going Off the Rails, describes the sad disintegration of what had been, despite apartheid and inequality, a great system. There are tidbits of great interest about the SAR such as, for instance, it could take credit for establishing a world record on the Sishen line for the longest and heaviest train ever run – 7.3km of 660 fully laden iron ore trucks, nine electric locomotives and seven diesel engines. A train 7.3km long!

Williams gives reasons why he thinks things went wrong, and makes suggestions how to get things back, er, on track. Then he quotes the Bokkies Joubert song: “It’s all been spoiled by politics/ Never going to be the same.”

I found this memoir/ dissertation/ wonderful piece of non-fiction a real delight. It is a history of South Africa through a particular lens, is beautifully written, often with real poetry, and it describes one man’s love story for trains and steam.

It reopened many happy memories for me. A great read.

• On the Railway is one of Exclusive Books’s top reads for August.