45 Years Ago. Leitz Elmar 50mm

In the last year or so, I have been slowly sifting through photographs I took in South Africa many years ago, and feeding the files through an AI program. It fills in missing digital information, and thus enhances the image, and makes photographs captured on film the very best that they can be to our 21st century digitally-attuned eyes.  These images are, in a sense, new photographs, and so I feel comfortable sharing them on these pages.

Here is a pair of images of the same train which I photographed on the Grahamstown branch in July, 1979.  I was using a Leica M2 with 50mm Elmar lens, inherited from my Dad.  Grahamstown is now called Makhanda in the post-Apartheid South Africa, and the railway line no longer exists. 

Here's the background:  My family used to visit this small, tidy university town every winter holiday from about 1963. My uncle, and aunt – cousin Crispin25’s mom -, had moved there from their farm near Cradock in the Eastern Cape.  Grahamstown/Makhanda is set in a shallow valley surrounded by heavily wooded hills.  It was served by a very busy secondary railway line which connected with the Cape Midlands Mainline at Alicedale, about 40 miles away.  The Grahamtown branch was distinguished by having some of the heaviest grades of any railway in South Africa – a ruling grade of 1:40 or 2.5% -, making the climb out of town an ordeal for the steam locomotives which hauled the trains.  Leaving the station, the track alignment was fairly straight, passing through numerous level crossings in the town, the drivers indulging in much whistle-blowing; flag-waving on the part of the crossing guards.  Then the track followed a huge horse-shoe bend - shown in the Main image -, to gain height out of the valley, doubling back on itself before commencing a meandering journey as it followed every fold of the land on the way to Alicedale. The Extra shows the same train almost at the summit of the line at Cold Spring, before commencing the long descent to Alicedale.  The line was so circuitous, that it was very easy to jump in the car and get ahead of the train to capture it at another advantageous spot.
A note about the locomotive:  It is a 19D, one of a class of 235 locomotives built for the South African Railways between 1937 and 1949.  They were the most ubiquitous engines used on South Africa's many remote branch lines.  The locomotive depicted is one of a batch of forty built with domeless boilers in Germany in 1937.  Here's a link to the Wiki article for those interested.