The recent Farrail Photographic Tour to South Africa has been covered in an extensive article in the respected German magazine, Lok Report, October 2023 issue. You can click here to read the German version or click here for the English translation.
Renowned South African photographer and videographer, Jean Dulez has just published a new book, “Railways of South Africa and Namibia” “Motive Power and Trains”.
Railway Historian, John Middleton, is well known to South African railway enthusiasts for his numerous books on South African Railways main line and Industrial locomotives over the last 30 years or so. His latest book, Industrial Locomotives of South Africa (Volume 1) has been published. This covers the three Cape provinces, Free State (including a Sandstone entry), Kwa-Zulu Natal and North West provinces. It is available as a hardback book (B5 size) has 496 pages, almost 300 photographs (158 in colour) and 40 maps. Volume 2 which should be ready in 2024 (its already in draft form) will cover the rest of the former Transvaal plus Swaziland and Lesotho.The book is a magnificent work of reference and has obviously been part of the author’s life for some time.
Pandora Village on Sandstone Estates is the home to many Sandstone employees and their children.
Being far from any municipal activity, rubbish collection is an issue but, thanks to an initiative by Morgan and Toni Barrett of the nearby Boschfontein Farm, each Tuesday the children meet up and pick up all the litter at Pandora Village. This is then sorted into the various recycling categories and taken to the Ficksburg Municipality landfill site / recycling depot. This programme was started on Boschfontein Farm and it has worked well with the children being rewarded for their efforts. Recently they were taken to Tempelhof Guest and Game Farm for an outing. Much fun was had by them all including the pursuit of a young monkey.
South African Tourism is a Government initiative to promote tourism to South Africa for business or pleasure and is very active in many centres around the world. A number of film productions are done each year to promote South Africa and Sandstone estates was chosen as one of the locations for a current production. Shooting took place over one day and featured a family ( film extras) on a visit to Sandstone where they experienced a steam train ride, an ox wagon plus a donkey cart ride. All of these are part of the “Sandstone Experience” that visitors to the Estate can enjoy on any visit.
The latest edition of Heritage Railway UK has given us a positive write up on International Visitors to Sandstone and some detail for the proposed David Williams Photographic Tour in June 2024.
With a number of new acquisitions the stock list for the Military Collection has been updated.
Photographer, Hinrich Brummer, sent us a selection of photographs taken during the recent FarRail Tour to Sandstone in early July. Featured locomotives are NGG13 number 49, NGG16 number 113 and NG15, “Kalahari” number 17.
