Will try to address several things at once.
(a) Forgot to mention this was 3.5 foot gauge which is actually the standard gauge for SA. They also have a 2-foot gauge. These engines are actually huge for this gauge. For comparison these 4-8-4's, which look a lot like a New York Central Niagara, or somewhat like a UP 800, have 60 inch main drivers. It was often stated that had South Africa built 4 foot 8.5 like the US, they may have had some of the largest engines ever built. As a comparison Norfolk and Western 4-8-4 611 has 70 inch drivers.
(b) Michael, was going to mention this for guys like you and Don Richter,that these were all shot with Pentax 6x7 color negs. All are one-shot deals, no motor drives on that baby and at $1.00 for every shot one was careful not to waste too much. Also would like to point out none of these has been cropped, and only a slight color saturation and hue. I seem to have trouble condensing and resizing some of these, since my photo shop showed them around 160-190 kb, but when I attached the files to this board they were all under 75 kb.
(c) We spent 5 days shooting the doubletrack De Aar-Kimberley line in 1984, which probably saw about 40 steam moves during 24 hours. We also spent 5 days on the George-Knysna Branch. We were there about 30 days on each of our two trips. In 1977 I did not have the Pentax, nor video
which I shot in 1984. I was shooting stills and video in 1984, sometimes only one or the other but on these I believe there is video of each scene as well. As my video business got going, I was doing less still photography. I have to say South Africa was a great big steam show and very "American" in style. The SA engines sounded far better than what we saw in Europe for the most part.
Greg
