Natal Government 4-8-0T Locomotives in South_Africa

Class 17 (Locobase 13100)

Data from Holland, Volume II (1972), pp. 63.

When the shunting (switching) engines then in use in the SAR's railyards proved too small for growing traffic demands, the shops resorted to a conversion of a modified locomotive. In this case, the Improved As (Locobase 2908) 4-8-2Ts were turned into tank-tender engines, in the process jettisoning both the trailing truck and the small coal bunker.

Because the tender had much more coal space and its water tankage was about double that of the side tanks, which remained in place, the engines had quite a bit of endurance. Otherwise, the engine retained its Belpaire firebox and inside link valve motion.

After the conversion program ended in 1929, the most of the class operated as shunters at Durban and Port Elizabeth for more than three decades before being retired and scrapped in 1961. The SAR sold 1423 and 1431 to the Zambezi Saw Mills Company's logging road in November 1953. The ZSMC ran the pair on the Mulobezi-Livingstone Railway in Northern Rhodesia (later Zambia) until 1961-1963. [Note: See Daniel N Posner's Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa (New York:Cambridge University Press, 2005), esp. p.76, for the M-L's use of Lozi-speaking Africans in their operations.]