A symbol of the Cape’s early railways

he construction of railways to link Cape Town, Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth) and East London to Griqualand West began in the early 1870s and was completed by the mid-1880s. Surveying the routes and constructing the railways brought unique challenges, not least the East London line that had to be built through the Cape’s turbulent Eastern Frontier region in which the 9th Frontier War raged in 1877 and 1878, followed by the