RAILWAY COUNTRY 150 Years of Rail in South Africa South ...

RAILWAY COUNTRY 150 Years of Rail in South Africa South Africa : RAILWAY COUNTRY Although the South African interior is generally high-lying, it is traversable, but it is largely separated from the coastline by a high, mountainous escarpment. Generally speaking too, its rich natural resources and extensive agricultural and pastoral areas are situated far into the interior, beyond the escarpment. In the early Years the ox and horse played an important part in opening up the interior, but the development that was soon to be needed to exploit the newly discovered mineral wealth called for a vastly more efficient mass transport mode.

All the way from the Leith works in Scotland, a small steam engine built by Hawthorne and Co. arrived in Cape Town harbour in September of 1859. It had been imported by Edward Pickering, the British contractor commissioned to build a railway from Cape Town to Wellington, a distance over mountainous terrain of just over 70 kilometres.

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