The Stinkwood Railway, Knysna, South Africa

[rogerfarnworth]

The April 1951 edition of The Railway Magazine carried a short article about a 2ft-gauge logging line in South Africa. The article was entitled, The Stinkwood Line. It drew my attention and I thought that it was worth investigation.

It turns out that the article was not as accurate as it might have been and it also failed to let magazine readers know that by the time of publication the line had been closed for at least 18 months.

http://rogerfarnworth.com/2019/04/15/the-stinkwood-railway

 

[Calthrop]

Highly interesting and in-depth material, on a line hitherto totally unknown to me -- thank you.

One thing mentioned, setting off thoughts on a basically other-than-railway theme: the forests which gave the line traffic, are also known as having natural-history interest as being the habitat of wild elephants (mentioned in the linked-to material -- also I think, something of which there's awareness in the world in general). The Railway Magazine article recounts how, seemingly circa 1920, the logging line was inaugurated "to replace the elephants then used for hauling the stinkwood trunks down from the forests to Knysna for shipment".

I'd thought that it was common knowledge that Asian elephants can be, and are, domesticated and used for haulage purposes; but African ones "can't, and are not". Is this perhaps, not a universal truth? -- or, one might wonder whether, from the sojourn at Knysna by the article's author, in which he discovered the railway; the "elephants" thing in the article, quoted above, resulted from the locals thinking "let's tell a tall tale to the gullible Brit, and see if he buys it" ...

 

[CarltonA]

Jumbo was an African elephant and worked at P T Barnum's Circus prior to being hit by a steam locomotive and coming off second best.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumbo

So perhaps they can be "persuaded" to carry out certain tasks.

 

[rogerfarnworth]

There is some uncertainty over the veracity of different bits of The Railway Magazine article, perhaps this is one of them. Certainly the line was not built by an Englishman and not in the 1920s either. The line from George to Knysna was built around this time.

 

[Calthrop]

Jumbo was an African elephant and worked at P T Barnum's Circus prior to being hit by a steam locomotive and coming off second best.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumbo

So perhaps they can be "persuaded" to carry out certain tasks.

Yes, a "blanket" generalisation would, likely, be excessive. So far as I'm aware, though -- for whatever the precise reasons may be, domestication on any large or systematic scale of Africa's bigger fauna, has never happened.