Our 2024 Cherry Steam Festival was an outstanding success with record number of visitors. We carried over 2000 passenger on out two rail systems, our main line with the mighty NGG16 Garratt locomotive and Seb’s Railway with new coaches and three different engines. The fly boys were there together with our military machines , earthmoving equipment, vintage cars, buses and tractors.
You’ll see from this video below that Patricia Glyn is on the hunt for the Southern African’s special stories for a video programme entitled “Storycatcher”. If you have one, please get in touch with her at
At the recent Clarens Heritage Association symposium, hosted on behalf of the Heritage Association of South Africa (HASA), Sandstone was honoured to receive a Gold Certificate Award for collecting, maintaining and exhibiting one of the finest collections of heritage transport and agricultural machinery in South Africa, and for ensuring that these grand examples of past implements and practices are preserved for future generations.
All our readers know our passion at Sandstone for our Oxen and we have been breeding more of these Afrikaner cattle over the last months. In spanning them for haulage duties is not always that easy and recently we had to bring together the six head that have proved very troublesome and disobedient when in spanned.
We recently received two articles from Stewart Currie at the RSSA Reef Branch, both from Allan Jorgensen, published many years ago in South African Transport magazine. “7 Light Rails”, from September 1978, has a piece on the Lawley locomotives of Buzi Sugar, Mozambique, two of which survived in the Peter Rampton collection in the UK.