Memories 0f travelling on a train in Kenya

 

 

• In 2006, Martin Langley (Nicholson, 1956-61) and I were shunting an idea back and forth for a new feature article on the Old Cambrian Website. It had to do with the Garratt steam locomotive and our memories, good and bad, of riding the school trains that it hauled. I first saw a Garratt in the late 1940s when the old railway alignment still ran close to the Kabete Technical and Trades School where my father taught. A friend at the school and his Dad were acquainted with one of the engine drivers, an affable, turbaned Sikh called Mohinder Singh. Through that fortuitous connection, at the age of eight I got a short but thrilling ride on the footplate of a Garratt locomotive from Kabete Station down to where the line crossed the road leading to the Vet Lab. Martin Langley had also been exposed to Garratts at a tender age. He remembers it this way: “I spent my primary school years in the South African railway junction town of Mafeking (of Boer War fame), with many of those years living in a house close to a railway crossing. Wide-eyed, my friends and I would watch the shunters and main line trains such as the Rhodesia Mail, headed by a Garratt, as it swung by on its way north to Bulawayo. Later on, after moving to Kampala, I experienced the Garratt first-hand on the school train to Nairobi. These early exposures left me with an enduring fascination with steam locomotives and the Garratt in particular.”
  
  So Martin and I decided that someone ought to write a piece on school trains and Garratts. I had recently returned to work full-time and couldn’t commit, but Martin bravely undertook to be the sole engineer. Thank goodness, because two years later, after a long haul up a steep gradient, he has brought the train, loaded with treasures, into Nairobi Station alongside Platform 1.
  
  To read this worthy feature is to take a fascinating ride down memory lane. Its contents include schoolboy memories (his own among them), a short history of the Garratt and the East African Railways, superb old train pictures, plenty of notes and technical data to satisfy the railway buff, an engine driver’s personal memoir, and even a couple of sound clips - one of them the Garratt’s distinctive two-beat chuffing, and the other a song called ‘The Good Old EAR&H’ by acclaimed alumnus, Roger Whittaker.
  
  All aboard, then, for a nostalgic journey back to a more innocent age when we were awestruck by the huge Garratt steam engine (painted maroon, grey, or black depending on your vintage), and when we rode the train with such heavy hearts at the beginning of a school term and with such great joy at the commencement of the holidays.
  
  (Brian McIntosh, Rhodes, 1953-59)