Love on the tracks

First light is coming to the harbour as we pick our way carefully along the tracks towards the Sauron glow of the headlamp in the gloom.

A steam engine hisses at the head of its train. On its red buffer beam “No” And “3322” in metal letters, and the name “Clare” on its smokebox door. 

With the smell of the sea on the morning wind and coffee from the dining car, there are the scents of burning oil and the damp, metallic taste of steam in the backs of our throats.

The two boys, seven and eight, and their mum, stand mesmerised at the sight and I remember a rail writer named David P Morgan taking his son to see steam engines at the local depot.

“He places his little hand in yours and holds on tight as you walk about the engine terminal, which is just as well for he’s so engrossed in the power on the ready track that you must guide him over the rails and around the standing pools and muddy oil,” Morgan writes. “For seconds he is awed and standing very close to you as a passenger engine backs past with its cylinder cocks open … Then he glances up to you with a small uncertain grin. ‘Is this better than a diesel?’”

The short answer is yes, at least in the heart where these things matter. It’s true that a pair of diesels will be coupled onto the train to help us over the pass, but everyone’s eyes are on the locomotive, wreathed in steam, its boiler thrumming with pent-up energy as the needle on its pressure gauge flickers at 180 pounds per square inch.

No 3322, a 19D-class branch line engine built in 1948 at a factory in the north of England and now owned by the Ceres Rail Company, is the train engine today. Shortly, the driver who goes by the inexplicable name of “Jan Taxi”, will pull the whistle cord and open the throttle and “Clare”, named after the company MD’s wife, and her string of 1940s wood-panelled saloons will ease away from the platform and pick her way through the grass growing over the tracks, clanking east through the flatlands to the mountains now silhouetted in the rising sun.

The boarding process is slick with the train manager marking off the arriving passengers on her iPad. The company has had time to perfect this operation, having nearly lost it all during the pandemic.

The crew is pleased. Almost 400 people have come to ride the train to the apple country at Elgin

In a pleasant echo of history the train follows the exact route once taken by loaded fruit trains that once ran from the Elgin orchards right into the docks for loading onto ships bound for Europe. 

Those trains are long gone now, lost to trucks the minute farmers could wash their hands of the erratic service being dished out by the SAR (SA Railways) in the 1970s, but that is another story.

At precisely 8.15am, with a slow, heavy exhalation of locomotive breath and a squeal of couplers, the train begins to move. It is fully light now as the train rolls through the docks, steam and smoke mingling with the sea breeze.

After a brief pause to couple on the diesels, we turn away from the sea and onto the Monte Vista avoiding line. For a while we run parallel to the highway and motorists stare open-mouthed, and hoot in a shock of memory and pleasure. 

It is Sunday and as there is no Metro traffic, we make good time, rattling through Goodwood and Oosterzee and into Bellville. The train and passengers are finding their rhythm now, helped along by the sway of the coaches and wheels clattering over the track joints. 

The boys stare out the open window at the changing picture and the glimpses of other peoples’ lives. A back garden with washing on the line, someone waving shyly from a half-open doorway, a cat skittering across a roof, birds rising in alarm at the approaching train. A grain terminal with a little shunting engine parked in the shade and an abandoned factory circled by rusting barbed wire. Some of the stations are newly painted; others bear the scars of pandemic looting, glassless windows looking down abandoned platforms.

We stop briefly at Van der Stel, on the other side of Somerset West. Nico, the stoker, has turned on the burners to make steam for the climb ahead. From here the railway snakes through Sir Lowry’s Pass Village then hikes along the edge of the Hottentots-Holland Mountains on a series of sweeping horseshoe curves.

In steam days it would sometimes take trains hours to climb the pass as ailing, badly maintained engines gave up the ghost before the summit. In April, with the fruit season in full swing, trains would be plodding up the pass, nose to tail, in an effort to clear the fruit before it rotted in the warehouses.

There will be no such problems today. Number 3322 is a well-kept locomotive with not a leaking valve or gland in sight and Nico has the burners on full as he makes steam. 

In steam days Nico would have been on his feet from Sir Lowry’s Pass village to the summit, shovelling coal in a ballet, the steps of which are known to anyone who has ever fired a steam locomotive: scoop, pirouette, lunge, flick, pirouette, repeat.

One of 3322’s sister engines, no 1412, is a coal burner that once worked the 159km railway from Graaff Reinet over the Sneeuberg Mountains to Middelburg.

In steam days that was a hell run for a fireman on a heavy train when he would be on his feet for the five or six hours it took for the train to pant its way up the 500 vertical metres from Graaff Reinet to the summit at Lootsberg, 99km away. That time he would shuffle nearly nine tonnes of coal on his own into the firebox.

Luckily for Nico 1412 is not allowed to run in summer in the Western Cape for fear of throwing a spark and starting a fire. All he has to do is make sure the boiler has enough water and that the burners stay alight.

The train rolls through Sir Lowry’s Pass Village and leans into the first horseshoe curve, its wheels biting into the track. Homes press up against the track on each side. Children shriek and wave and shout hello. A dog does spins in demented circles in its yard.

The loco’s exhaust beat and the clicketyclack of the wheels echo off the trees, wheel flanges squealing against the curves. 

We climb out of the gum trees and onto the side of the mountain itself. False Bay spreads off to the west in a shimmering, blue plate, and Table Mountain and the peninsula are sharply etched against a cobalt sky.

Passengers have their heads out of open windows, taking in the view and the scents of hot oil and exhaust and fynbos, sun on their faces.

An hour later the train rolls downhill into Elgin Station. The passengers disembark to immerse themselves in the delights of the railway market — food, wine, beer on tap, fresh coffee, all gathered in a warehouse with huge overhead fans, wood stoves radiating heat. Outside the kids make new friends in the play area or pet the dogs up for adoption. Some hide in the book bus, a kind of mobile library, which is less mobile but still full of books. 

Over in the yard, the train crew are shunting as they ready the train for the return journey.

And so the hours amble past until the engine’s whistle calls us back to the train.

We roll back through the orchards onto the reverse side of the pass. There are fewer heads now. The passengers are lulled to sleep by full bellies and the rhythm of the wheels over track joints and the gentle swaying of the coaches as we roll back down the pass. It’s like being gently held in a big, warm hand.

We make fast time back to Cape Town, chasing the sunset back into the very same harbour where the apples once came by rail. 

As we squeal to a halt, James, the eight-year-old, says, “I think this was my best day ever.”

— Ash was a guest of Ceres Rail.

• Ceres Rail will run trains to the Elgin Railway market most weekends in June. See www.ceresrail.co.za.