Pietermaritzburg and the railway
13 Jan 2010

There is no better way to approach Pietermaritzburg than on a train from the 'interior' - the term used by our forebears to indicate those dim and distant parts west of the Drakensberg. Like a celestial vision in a Bunyanesque dream, Maritzburg floats and dazzles in one's compartment window, and then is gone as the train buries itself in unhallowed regions, passes through sloughs of despond (one of the tunnels is in fact the longest in the southern hemisphere) until, suddenly, the radiant vision fills the window again, giving stupendous glimpses not only of the City itself but of half of Natal, a mantle of tropical green stretching far beyond Table Mountain. Thereafter the visionary 'Capital' starts to assemble itself as an actual place of brick and mortar, with leafy backyards and genial groves of pawpaws and banana trees. After a good twenty minutes, the descent is complete. With much squealing of brakes and groaning of flanges the 'yards' come into view that bespeak the City's importance as an intersection of branch-line railways.

Those branch lines spell one fact about Pietermaritzburg that - if I may go back to my notion of Ariel's Island, filled with unseen music - was for many decades obvious more to the ear than the eye. It is a truism that, for the best part of a century, the magical sound of labouring steam-engines was never long out of earshot of the City of Pietermaritzburg. I can give my personal assurance that there was no better way for a schoolboy to fall asleep on a Sunday night in the 'fifties and 'sixties than with the faraway ever-changing voices of double-headed Garratts, tackling the tortuous curves below Claridge with (at a distance, at any rate) a dreamy lullaby effect, able to empty one's mind of the doleful prospect of the coming week. Indeed, for the railway historian, the City's distinction lies in what (to the unconverted) might seem a rather marginal fact. For several decades, Pietermaritzburg was the 'Garratt capital' of the world with a wonderful grimy stud of Garratt locomotives, engines whose single boiler and two sets of driving wheels make together a three-part chassis, and whose performance on the climbs out of Maritzburg was so prolonged and thrilling as to bring photographers from far and wide to witness their efforts.

This somewhat esoteric claim to fame will not, perhaps, convince the general historian, nor would it have been anticipated by those solid worthies of the town who, early in the 1880s, after much flagwaving and festivity, found the iron horse to be firmly established on their landscape. As a matter of fact, the brand new ribbon of steel that coiled up from the coast proved to be not quite the boon and herald of a new era that they had hoped. Personal tax came in as a direct result of the railway, and the NGR (Natal Government Railway - though irreverently nicknamed 'Never Goes Right') was subject to a great deal of satire, if not out-and-out criticism, right from the start. There was for instance the fairly astounding fact that the first trains knocked off only half an hour from the schedule for Mr Welch's horse-drawn mail service, and since these were the days when railway carriages were of a peculiarly unsprung and boxy variety, there was no guarantee that the ride behind the iron horse would turn out to be the more comfortable experience.

Since the speeds attained on what was called the 'Cape' gauge were never glamorous, we might ask why the first shrieking little tank engines, that weren't allowed to hit it beyond 24 kilometres an hour, couldn't give a better account of themselves. In answering that we have to make one or two points about the topography of Natal, not so obvious to the human eye, but all too obvious to a railway engineer, who has to restrict gradients and curvature to practical limits. African terrain is of such a great scale that it swallows height, with huge horizons that erase the great altitudes that are contained within them. The first night-train from Pietermaritzburg to Ladysmith, which the governor and his wife up there at Government House heard whistling its departure at 11 p.m., back in 1889, would, by the time it reached Hilton, be only 24m lower than the Gotthard tunnel, and, by Lidgetton, higher than any point on the Gotthard route, or on the mainline from Zurich to Vienna. Of course this really demonstrates that European engineers had far more capital to sink into their broad-gauge routes, so could afford the elaborate tunnelling necessary to avoid bridging the mountains themselves. The Gotthard route, opened in 1882, required a capital outlay of £9 million, whereas the line from Pietermaritzburg to Ladysmith, opened in 1886, and 32 km longer than the Gotthard, had to be built and equipped with £1½ million. So the driver of that first 11 p.m. train to Ladysmith, toiling round the curves above Pietermaritzburg (would he have seen a candlelight glow in the valley as he got towards Hilton?) must have been considerably taxed to get into Ladysmith by 6.30 next morning.

The climb out of the colonial Capital had an epic quality. A journalist who accompanied the inaugural train wrote: ‘Halfway up the hill, the serpentine track bewilders one, and then the line strikes towards Kettlefontein. A splendid view of the City is had as the labouring engine skirts ahead of the Zwaartkop Valley. The top of Town Hill is reached at the 12th mile, and looking down in the far away valley, the passenger begins to wonder what manner of invention is this that can overcome such obstacles and yet have strength enough to go further ...’

The topography of Natal helps to explain, then, why Mr Welch's horse cart that disappeared down Polly Shortt's every day to Durban had only 54 miles ahead of it, while the new line up from Durban was in excess of 70 miles. But this apologia for the railway explains only half the case. The other half lies in the principle of what I call railway amnesia, the principle defined by one Mr Pinson in the Legislative Council of 1888 (by which time parliamentary debates had become a major entertainment for the citizenry of Pietermaritzburg). Mr Pinson complained that: ‘[the] time and expenditure in wages and coal lost in waiting at stat ions must be very considerable indeed. There is no necessity for it ... There is not a single thing done, and nothing to stop for, and you look out, and wonder what is the meaning of it’.

It is a mystery that lies intact to this day, but in the first decades of the NGR it was the source of much sati re, as we can soon discover in the colonial newspapers. Thus for instance the 'Man in the Moon', writing for the Natal Mercury in July 1884:

Scene: 1st Class Carriage between Durban and Maritzburg.

Characters: A visitor to the colony and a railway manager.

Visitor: Does the management of this concern allow passengers to give them advice, if it is rendered in a respectful manner?

Manager: The Management is very glad to receive suggestions for the improvement of the railway.

Visitor: Well, it occurs to me it would be as well to detach the cow-catcher from the front of the engine, and hitch it to the rear of the train, for you see, we are not liable to overtake a cow: but what is to prevent a cow trotting up to the rear and butting us off the track.

(Collapse of Manager.)

When it was discovered that the several viaducts on the new line showed a tendency not to maintain their rigidity, the railway debates drew even greater audiences. Maritzburgers revelled in such picturesque news as that provided by Mr Binns, Member for Victoria County, who said that the bridges on the main line were 'standing in every position but the right one, and altogether presenting a most miserable spectacle'. One found 'some in plasters, the next in splints, and the next in bandages'. No wonder a Natal Witness for June 1884 asks darkly: 'Who are "the women" in the railway scandal? Answer: Misconstruction and Mismanagement'.

One Witness editorial illustrates the general enjoyment of Natal's own railway crisis when it reports 'the crowded condition of the galleries. It is seldom nowadays that our Senators reach the small hours . . .' Amongst those who relished the atmosphere were, it appears, 'boys too young to understand anything . . . some alone, and some brought by thoughtless parents'. It seems that the Huck Finns and Tom Sawyers of Pietermaritzburg found the railway debate a choice venue for illicit breakaways.

One rapidly discovers, in these debates, how much rhetorical mileage there was to be had from the nice fact that Pietermaritzburg was, in colonial parlance, the 'City' and Durban merely the 'Town' (or, at best, the 'Port'). It was, therefore, an undoubted blow to the 'City's' pride that the chief colonial civil servant, the General Manager of Railways, held sway and ruled his kingdom of iron from the town of Durban. Could Maritzburg get the mighty Sir David Hunter to entertain the notion of residence in 'the City'? It tried to do so by the erection, in the Capital, of a new NGR Engineers' Office, a building that would stand, in due course, next to the Natal Museum, and which indeed presently serves as the SAP central charge office. But this building was originally intended for grander personages than engineers; it was conceived as a sort of Maritzburg blandishment to bring the General Manager up to the 'City', and break him in to the notion of actually being directed by the Government.

Hence some undisguised faction fighting in the House. The eloquent member for Pietermaritzburg City (Mr O'Meara) asked the Minister of Railways: ‘Now I would like my honourable friend to tell us what is lost in Durban by the general manager not residing there. These Durban gentlemen pay none of the railway carriage. Not a single merchant in Durban pays one single sixpence in railway rates . . . I tell these gentlemen they pay nothing at all, they simply pay upon what they use in their own houses for their own consumption. What did we find Sir David Hunter doing (and this is why I want the general manager removed from that unholy influence with which Sir David Hunter is surrounded in the town of Durban). We find him carrying sugar for the planter s for 15 years and giving them threepence a ton for sending it to the railway to carry. Is that a management this country is prepared to put up with? No sir, I hold that the proper place for the General Manager is in this city, where he can be controlled by the city . . .’

To further protests from 'the Port', the City's MP asked: ‘I want to know who is running this country. Are these few gentlemen from Durban going to govern the general manager of railways? Now we have had some experience of this great gentleman, Sir David Hunter, that we hear so much about . . . I have the greatest respect for Sir David Hunter as a private gentleman, but as a public servant that gentleman ought to have been pensioned off ten years ago or he ought to have been brought to Maritzburg and controlled by the Government of the day’.

Alas, the 'unholy influence' proved more durable than Mr O'Meara's eloquence, and the General Manager did not add to the various glories of his office that of residence in Pietermaritzburg.

Another 'hardy annual' amongst 1890s railway debates concerned the 'Extension to Howick Railway Bill'. Should a spur be built off the main line at Merrivale to take in Howick, especially now that the Falls had earned themselves a reputation as inland Natal's chief natural spectacle? (The Drakensberg became generally accessible only with the building of the Winterton branch in the 1900s.) We must remember that, in the last years of the nineteenth century, the Thomas Cook euphoria took Kodak-wielding imperialists to the Rockies and the Pyramids, and now it had even reached the sleepier quarters of the Southern Hemisphere. The Colonial Secretary argued that a line to the Falls was necessitated since 'tourists from Great Britain and other countries are coming to South Africa more and more every year, and we want to encourage traffic of that kind'. But, in a colonial parliament, to move solid Victorians to any sort of action you had to enlist a moral principle rather than a pleasure principle, and this Mr T. Kirkman, member for Alexander County, was well able to do. In his vocabulary, the proposed four miles of branch-line took on a neo-Kantian hue. 'I have looked upon this railway,' said Mr Kirkman, 'and still look upon it, as an educational railway'. This certainly sounds better than a 'tourist' railway, and in fact our nineteenth-century idealist gives us one of the earliest hints that, by now, 'industria' had enveloped the colonial Capital. The new branch to the Falls would take city dwellers - so Mr Kirkman claimed: ‘. . . away from this humdrum place in which there is nothing whatever on which to spend their time or to interest them. (‘Oh, oh' from several Hon. members, and 'Shame' from Mr Tatham.)

Apparently Mr Kirkman's colleagues were reluctant to discover in Pietermaritzburg a sort of tropical Leeds, but their dissension only spurred him on further: ‘The railway will enable people to see something more than public houses . . . It will lead to the non-necessity for such places as inebriate retreats . . .’

(At which point, of course, he veritably echoes Thomas Cook, whose tourists were sent off to the ends of the Empire with much 'prohibitionary' enthusiasm.) But was Pietermaritzburg of the 1890s so squalid that a railway line should be built for its moral health? Mr Kirkman thought so: ‘Young men and others . . . should have an opportunity of seeing something other than the walls of churches, something which will appeal to them far more eloquently from nature, from the running water and from anything that appeals to one's inner senses, something above the life of a city like this’.

One could hardly deny that Howick would provide the spiritually starved with the sight of running water. But Mr Kirkman's radical secularism was too much for a colonial assembly, and to everyone's relief Mr Hulett quickly moved closure.

In some smoky and steely heaven, which blends incipient Wordsworthianism with the 'Cape' 3 ft. 6 in. gauge, I hope that I survive to assure a spectral Mr Kirkman that no one derived more joy from his 'educational' picnic line (it was completed, eventually, in 1911) than I did. But of course the motive power - by the time the ride to Howick became my chief means to witness 'running water' as a spiritual refreshment - was ·electricity, and I must now observe another historical fact that will seem of relevance only to the most 'smitten' sort of historian. Maritzburg was, for nearly two decades, the chief town on the longest electrified line in the world. Even the development of the Garratt locomotive could not defer the decision, in the early 1920s, to surmount the extraordinary difficulties of the Natal route by using the new-fangled traction that was now proving itself in the Alps and the Rockies.

The result was the 'units'! This was the Natal nomenclature for the excellent 1 200 hp Metro-Cammell electric engines that, single or in multiple, worked the chief arterial line of the Union, and then the Republic, of South Africa. The 'units', (which word rather imitates their characteristic grinding whine) did not generate their power on board, and so were not, by Stephenson's principles, 'locomotives'. I have to confess - as a well-worn steam-lover - that, in the conditions of sub-tropical railway travel, one did fairly gasp with relief when, after a long grimy day behind steam on any of the branches, one at last boarded a mainline train behind the units. In fact, if I may finish on an outrageously personal note, let me take you to Maritzburg station in the early fifties, with the mail train for Johannesburg about to arrive just after 7.00 p.m. First came the sound alone, the exhilarating high whine of the units, and then, peering round the curve, a single yellowish headlamp. Then, in a nice exhibition of railway dramatics, the train spent an aeon creaking slowly into the station, since Maritzburg was a city so portentously important that the carriage wheels must be checked here all along the train. When it was at last 'landed' one took up one's position beneath the driver's cab, to savour the panting and spluttering and coughing of the hydraulics, together with various clatter-clatter interludes as the vacuum was restored.

And then, some acrobatics of shunting in the eight-minute wait. The Maritzburg situation was a veritable feast, especially in winter. The units unlatched and hurried off, making their whining and throttle-belching noises, to pick up a steam heater truck. Quickly one scampered down the platform to where a steam shunt was adding a coach or two from East Griqualand at the back of the 'mail'.

Then a scamper back to the units for take-off - as thrilling with those first-generation units as with steam engines. Two bells and a green light, and then - none of the complacent gliding of their modem successors. It could take up to five explosive punches on the driver's control before the two units would at last move the long brown train behind them. If the driver got to the fifth slot on his control, he would have used up all the coupling slack that he had carefully prepared when the train first got in. So the 'mail' would leave with a great heave felt right down the train, persuading the anti-steam faction, perhaps, that the electrics weren't such heaven-sent creatures after all. Last sight of the mail train would be a string of lights 300 m above Pietermaritzburg, whining gloriously into the night . . .

Caption: The unsteady Inchanga viaduct, c.1886.

SOURCE: Pietermaritzburg 1838–1988: a new portrait of an African city, edited by John Laband and Robert Haswell (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press and Shuter & Shooter, 1988), pp. 139–141.