The next time you take a drive along the N3, where the highway crosses the Vaal, look east and you’ll see a fine six-span steel truss bridge, the colour of old rust, crossing the river.
It’s been a landmark for David Williams ever since he first travelled that road.
“It’s astonishing, that bridge,” he says. “Every time I go past it, I look at it and I think they built this huge bridge ... for a little cross-country branch railway.”
Williams, inveterate journalist and historian, did some digging. He discovered that once upon a time there was a daily passenger train on that line, running overnight from Harrismith, up through the maize fields around Reitz and Frankfort, and crossing over the Vaal before joining the main Durban-Joburg mainline at Balfour North.
“There were all these trains,” he says. “They didn’t have dining cars, but they had sleeping cars because they were mostly night trains. And you could catch them anywhere.”
The theme of magic and loss is one of the layers that underpins Williams’s memoir, On the Railway: The Great South African Train Story. He would know, because he was born and spent his childhood in a railway house next to the main line where it runs through Estcourt in KwaZulu-Natal.
Williams manages to combine the drama and colour of the railway and its history and lasting (not always happy) impact on South Africa with the real-life experience of someone who comes from that world.
One of his earliest memories is of being woken in the early mornings by the sound of steam engines on the shunts. “I just remember all the sounds, the hissing steam and then the hammering of the exhaust from the chimney.
“They used to start at four in the morning. I remember asking my dad, ‘why don’t they start at eight in the morning or seven in the morning?’ ‘No’, he said, ‘they always start very early.’”
Estcourt was a busy place then, an industrious little town served by the railway. “There were sidings to the bacon factory, the Masonite factory. There was a branch line to Bergville and a narrow-gauge line to Weenen.”
It was only 46km by rail to Weenen but the little engines on the narrow-gauge line would make a day of the trip, occasionally stopping amid the thorn trees and aloes to let African rock pythons make their way over the tracks.
As childhood memories go, Williams’s are full of the railway, and his fascination with it was, perhaps, inevitable. He was mesmerised by timetables and signalling. He describes a moment when his father takes him to the locomotive shed where he watches a fitter, simply known as “Smit”, tapping a steam engine wheel with a hammer, listening for a tone that only he could hear that would herald a crack developing in the steel.
The Williams family were part of what he called “this vast organism”. His father was an electrician for what was then the South African Railways & Harbours (SAR&H), an enterprise that was once the spine of South Africa’s industrial, economic and even social development.
From the beginning, the railway was both a beneficiary and a blunt instrument of the system. The top jobs — train drivers and stokers, clerks, station masters, fitters, track engineers, locomotive foremen, signallers — were reserved for whites
They lived with all the other railway people in a crescent of SAR houses. A railway police sergeant and his family lived next door. The locomotive foreman lived next to him. Over the road was the driver of the Bergville train.
“The houses were very small, close together. The women were in and out of each other’s houses all the time, visiting and gossiping and borrowing sugar. It was really an integrated and, to some extent, isolated community.”
The isolation came from the nature of the organisation itself. One of the notes he makes in the book is that in 1948, one out of every eight white men was employed by the railway.
Yet the railways, and often also the people who worked for it, were the objects of scorn, and it was no different in a small town like Estcourt.
“The guys who worked at Masonite and the bacon factory, they were a cut above the railway people,” he says. “And then there were people up on the hill, managers of this and that ... they were different.”
When Williams said he wanted to be an engine driver, his mother — whose family worked on the gold mines — said he could do “much better than that. My father said the drivers are actually an elite ...”
It was not to be. Still, he would not be deterred from at least experiencing some of this world firsthand. In the early 1980s, Williams telephoned the SAR’s catering department and asked for a job as a steward.
The only question he was asked at his job interview was if he had a Std 8 certificate, after which he was sent down to the fourth floor to be issued with his uniform: “Two pairs of trousers, one smart jacket, a waistcoat and a bowtie.”
A veteran dining-car steward taught him how to carry six loaded plates at a time and how to serve food with one hand using just a spoon and fork. Learning how to do this in a rocking and rolling dining car travelling at speed would come with time.
He was assigned to a dining car called “Coega”. The car was a microcosm of the railway. At the top of the hierarchy was the chief steward. Under him was his mercurial-tempered second-in-command — the “seckie” — who, like an army platoon sergeant, issued the chief’s instructions. Alain, the “fat and florid” chef, was missing a front tooth, while one of his eye teeth had been filed to a spike. There were four stewards — all white — and two coloured crewmen — a pantryman, who looked after the stock, and a scully who did the dishes.
And so the crew set sail on the rails. This was a time when the dining car was still the centrepiece of South Africa’s long-distance passenger trains. The stewards worked 18-hour days, starting with serving the passengers coffee at 5am, working their way down the corridors of the humming train, rattling their carriage keys on the compartment doors, “Morning sir/môre meneer, coffee/koffie, tea/tee”.
Then they served breakfast, cleared away the plates, set the tables for lunch and, after that, dinner. Sittings would be announced by a steward walking the length of the train calling the passengers with a six-note gong called a Deagan chime.
The dining-car experience figures heavily in stories from people who remember travelling by train. They remember smells of cooking from the dining car, the starched white tablecloths and the heavy pewter tableware, coffee pots engraved with the SAR&H monogram, and watching, through a window patterned with a springbok head, the veld slide past at a pace that now seems unthinkably gentle.
It was, of course, an experience that was denied to many of the passengers on the same train who, because they were black, were not allowed in the dining car.
Many rail histories and memoirs ignore apartheid. Part of the reason is the actual structure of the railway itself. From the beginning, the railway was both a beneficiary and a blunt instrument of the system. The top jobs — train drivers and stokers, clerks, station masters, fitters, track engineers, locomotive foremen, signalmen — were reserved for whites.
Until the rotten system began cracking in the 1980s, black workers were given the grunt work — track workers, sweepers and engine wipers. They coaled steam locomotives, trundled piles of ash away from the servicing pits in wheelbarrows, and worked in gangs in the brutal toil of fixing rails.
Williams tackles the convoluted insanity of it head-on — the obscenity of job reservation, “Slegs Blankes” passenger coaches and waiting rooms, and the indignity of being a third-class citizen in a third-class railway carriage.
That history is one of the reasons South Africa’s railways are in such a fragile state today. A system designed for the benefit of only one group carried within it, as Mark Twain said of empires, the seeds of its own destruction.
It’s not over yet. Prasa, the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa, for all its sclerosis, has made progress repairing the commuter lines ravaged during the Covid lockdown and introducing new trains. Transnet, still fighting the effects of decades of mismanagement and free-for-all trucking stealing its business, may yet be saved by infusions of expertise from the private sector.
Until then, we have Williams’s magic and loss. He imagines a little black child living near the railway back in the day when the steam engines still ruled.
“He is excited by the passing steam engine and longs to ride in the coaches. He does not yet know that he is doomed never to drive the train; never sleep in a padded bunk and feel the crisp, white sheets and thick blue blankets; never to see in the dim glow of the green nightlight his father’s jacket and trousers swinging from a hook as the coach sways or as the train slows; never to hear the steam locomotive up ahead, hammering into the night with its fierce orange fire box and its trusted crew of two, and never to hear the rattle of the compartment door that heralds early morning coffee.”
On The Railway: The Great South African Train Story, by David Williams (Tafelberg)
