East African Railways & Harbours

Any good and available books about EAR&H eqpt and operations ?

i know our local libtrary had a book on the tamzam railway . dont know the title though . George Matthews , aa regular poster here , has lived in the region i believe .

Cactus Jack wrote:Any good and available books about EAR&H eqpt and operations ?

I don't know of any books but there is the Lunatic Express, linked to on this page.
http://www.angelfire.com/mac/egmatthews ... kenya.html

I checked with Amazon and found this one:
Gari la Moshi Steam Locomotives of the East African Railways ~ R Ramaer

Gari la Moshi is Swahili for railway train. Moshi is smoke or steam.

In the 1960s I travelled over most of the main lines of this system from Mombasa to Kampala and Nairobi to Dar es Salaam and Tanga, and Dar es Salaam to Tabora and Mwanza and also to Kigoma. I often travelled between Kisumu and Nairobi. Many of these journeys are no longer possible. The system got broken up when the East African Community broke up. The Kenya railways remained in fairly good condition but the others have deteriorated.
The EAC is being put together again but I doubt if the railways will be reunited.

In Tanzania I was travelling eastwards from Tabora when the train stopped for a long time. I was in a first class compartment. As I saw people getting off the train and walking about I decided to follow them. I walked up to the steam locomotive and found one of the passengers helping to repair it. He was an Asian former employee of the railways who had either retired or had been replaced by a local but had enough skills to tackle the problem, which I think may have been a spring. That was probably about 1967.

I live mostly in Kenya, with stints in South Africa. My library includes:

Steam Twilight - the last years of steam on Kenya Railways by Kevin Patience

Steam in East Africa - a pictorial history of the railways in East Africa 1893-1976 by Kevin Patience

Lunatic Express by Charles Miller

The Man-Eaters of Tsavo and other East African Adventures by J Patterson

Permanent Way Vol I by M F Hill (official history of the Kenya-Uganda Railway

Permanent Way Vol II by M F Hill (official history of the Tanganyika Railway)

Railway Across the Equator by Mohamed Amin (coffee table picture book)

Steam Locomotives of the East African Railways by R Ramaer

Gari la Moshi: Steam locomotives of the East African Railways by R Ramaer (basically an updated version of his earlier book)

I can recommend all of them! Quite a few are out of print, but can often be found on online second hand book sites. Some have been reprinted, and Gari la Moshi is very new.

Cheers!
John