“Hello Boet, this is 531 at Bubye bridge, I have a hotbox and the axle has broken, can you call for the platelayers”.
A hotbox on a railway truck can mean lots of things from the box getting hot to getting too hot and seizing the axle or shearing it off.
The worst had happened and the axle had broken and damaged approximately 150 meters of track.
“Ok, I’ll come and look”
Where the train had stopped was nearly 2 km’s from my caravan. I had my bakkie with me and set off down the fire path. It had rained during the night and the road was very slippery. I had only gone a few hundred meters when I felt the wheels go into the mud and the bakkie started to slew off the road. Once off the road the ground was very soft and there I sat, up to the axle in the mud.
Walking back to the caravan I phoned control and asked them to contact the platelayers and ask them to help me out of the mud.
Here I was sitting with my wheels out of commission and a train in the middle of nowhere that could not go anywhere, what a situation.
Ref. Rhodesia
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