A LIMITED SPECIAL OFFER ON SEB’S HEART OF AFRICA RAILWAY!
For a limited period only, we can offer a steam hauled trip on Seb’s Heart of Africa Railway for 20 people for just R8500 including VAT! That is a huge saving, so book now while the offer lasts! As an added attraction we can offer a Walking Tour at a special price of just R275 including VAT per head if you take the Seb’s train offer! - Contact us for more information
Three locomotives, originally from Sandstone’s Bloemfontein facility, are now under cover. From left to right, 11 Class 929, 19D 2654 and 24 Class 3688.
All the locomotives and rolling stock moved from Bloemfontein and Germiston are now in a covered facility at Sandstone.
Recently a classic BM Volvo 600 tractor was donated to Sandstone by a farmer in the Memel district of the Free State in South Africa.
With our limited events during and after the Covid pandemic, coverage of Sandstone in international magazines has been less than we previously enjoyed. So we were pleased to see that Vintage Sprit magazine covered our Easter event with a letter from contributor, Peter Brockington.
You can access details of Vintage Spirit, which covers Steam and Industrial Heritage, on the following link.
Although Covid is no longer an issue, we were obviously unable to host the number of events that we normally would have held at Sandstone Estates over the past few years. However, the demand is returning and we did have a successful Easter Festival.
Our next event will be the Cherry Steam Festival which has always been well attended. We will again be partnering with a number of local attractions as in 2021. The Cherry Steam Festival will run from Friday 18th November to Saturday 19th November 2022. - Click here to view full details and how to book
We recently featured, on the 19th May, the presentation of a large Skoda works plate by Svatopluk (Sváťa) Šlechta from The Czech Republic. Sváťa has now sent us the full history of the plate and pictures of the two locomotives that carried the plate during their service in the former Czechoslovakia. Click here to read the story.
Recent weather events at Sandstone Estates led to a unique harvesting approach for the Soya crop from way back in time. Click here to read more
One of Sandstone’s long time European supporters is Svatopluk Slechta, an engineer from the Czech Republic and a great rail enthusiast. He has visited Sandstone many times on his tours of South Africa, most recently at our Easter Steam Festival. We were pleased and honoured to be presented with a brass Skoda works plate by him. Today most people imagine that Skoda, founded in 1859 by Emil Skoda, just made cars but, in years gone by, they also built many steam locomotives including a batch of South African Railways (SAR) 19D class. To this day they are still in the rail transportation arena producing trams and propulsion units for trolleybuses, albeit now a separate company from the car manufacturing arm.
Svata, as he is known, is also currently writing a book on the history of Skoda steam locomotives and was looking for assistance in obtaining pictures of the fifteen Skoda built 19D locomotives. These were manufactured in 1938 and carried SAR numbers 2626 to 2640. Three examples survive today of which number 2633 is plinthed at Sandstone. This was sold by the SAR in the 1980s to become Sappi No. 2. It was donated to Sandstone in 2019.
Through our connections with railway photographers, both in South Africa and overseas, we were able to obtain a large number of photographs of Skoda 19Ds in service in South Africa. Sandstone’s thanks Svata, for his generosity and wishes him well with his new book.
Our gallery shows the presentation of the Skoda plate to Sandstone, L to R, Mike Myers and Dave Richardson from Sandstone and Svata Slechta.
Our second picture shows Skoda built 19D number 2633 plinthed at Sandstone.
