Sudan Railway 4-4-0 Locomotives in Sudan

Class Tamai (Locobase 10429)

Data from "The Cape to Cairo Railway," The Locomotive Magazine, Vol IX (26 December 1903), pp. 372-373. Works number was 1646.

This was a small oil-burning Eight-wheeler that had its slender dome placed forward of the coupled axles, a capped stack, prominent safety-valve stand just ahead of the cab,and an unusual tender layout in which the leading axle was a single fixed unit and the trailing axles were held in a swiveling bogie.

Compared to other Cape-gauge 4-4-0s, the Tamai fell a bit below the average while not descending to "tiny". Its oil-fired boiler reflected the dearth of coal in its operating area.

Class Tokar/Class 36 (Locobase 12261)

Data from Baldwin Locomotive Works Specification for Engines as digitized by the DeGolyer Library of Southern Methodist University Volume 21, p.143. See also "Baldwin Locomotives for the Soudan [sic]", American Engineer, Car Builder and Railroad Journal, Volume 72, No 4 (April 1898), p. 138. Works numbers were 16475-16477 in January 1899.

This quartet of Eight-wheelers were the first to be bought from the US for operation in Sudan. Their copper fireboxes were designed to burn small Welsh coal and "afterwards oil." So Baldwin shipped an oil tank for each engine that would carry 1,100 US gallons (917 Imperial gallons).

Their purchase by the British War Office, a source rarely disposed to consider American locomotives, stemmed from an urgent need to obtain passenger power for Kitchener's military railway. The order arrived in Philadelphia on 6 January 1898 with the requirement that the locomotives be shipped by March 6. Baldwin beat the deadline by almost a month when it loaded the engines on board SS Stalheim on 11 February. Their names, in order of road number, were Tokar, Tambuk, Sinkat, and Amur.