Heritage - News
23rd August 2007
One of our crack technical team commissions container lifter.
In terms of a working relationship with the Statfold Barn Railway in the UK, the Sandstone Heritage Trust will be entering into a number of locomotive exchange programmes whereby locomotives from Statfold will come out to work a season or two in South Africa and vice-versa.
Statfold specifically said that they would send Narrow Gauge locomotives out in containers which would remain their property and could be used to return the locomotives in due course back to the UK. These containers would be specially fitted with additional spares and other items. As such Sandstone had the challenge of loading and offloading containers, which is now solved by the acquisition of a container lifter. This machine, purchased on a tender from Spoornet Cape Town (for less than £1,000), was transported up to Sandstone where it was checked thoroughly by Desmond Clarke and is now in full mechanical working order. A cosmetic restoration will follow.
Although not a preservation project as such it will probably turn out to be the only container lifter of its type in preservation anywhere in the world.
We actually have very little technical information on this machine so if anybody has any experience of these machines we would like to hear from them.
The details are as follows:
engine 6cyl cummins turbo
type N7C-230
ENG NO 23138556
GEARBOX VOITH 2 SPEED AUTO
NO 33929
SWL LIFTING CAPACITY 24T
CAN PICK UP 3 AND 6M CONTAINERS 
