South African Class 34-200

The South African Class 34-200 of 1971 is a South African diesel-electric locomotive from the South African Railways era.

Between October 1971 and March 1972 the South African Railways placed fifty Class 34-200 General Motors Electro-Motive Division type GT26MC diesel-electric locomotives in service.^[2]

Manufacturer

The Class 34-200 type GT26MC diesel-electric locomotive was designed and built for the South African Railways (SAR) by General Motors Electro-Motive Division (GM-EMD) and imported. Fifty locomotives were delivered between October 1971 and March 1972, numbered in the range from 34-201 to 34-250.^[1][2][3]

Class 34 series

GE and GM-EMD designs

The Class 34 locomotive family consists of seven series, the General Electric (GE) Classes 34-000, 34-400, 34-500 (also known as "34-400 ex Iscor") and 34-900, and the GM-EMD Classes 34-200, 34-600 and 34-800. Both these manufacturers also produced locomotives for the South African Classes 33, 35 and 36.^[2]

Distinguishing features

On the GM-EMD Class 34 series locomotives, Class 34-200 and 34-600 locomotives are visually indistinguishable from one another, but they can be distinguished from the Class 34-800 by the thicker fishbelly-shaped sills on their left sides, compared to the straight sill on the left side of the Class 34-800.^[4][5]

Service

South Africa

In South Africa the Class 34-200s work on most mainlines and some unelectrified branchlines in the central, eastern, northern and northeastern parts of South Africa.^[3]

NLPI Ltd.

NLPI Limited (abbreviated from New Limpopo Projects Investments), a Mauritius-registered company, specialises in private sector investments using the build-operate-transfer (BOT) concept. It had three connected railway operations in Zimbabwe and Zambia that formed a rail link between South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo.^[1]

• The Beitbridge Bulawayo Railway (BBR), commissioned on 1 September 1999, operates the Beit Bridge to Bulawayo line in Zimbabwe.
• Since February 2004 NLPI Logistics (NLL or LOG) operates between Bulawayo and Victoria Falls on the Zimbabwe-Zambia border.
• Since February 2003 the Railway Systems of Zambia (RSZ) operated on the former Zambian Railways (ZR) from Victoria Falls to Sakania in the Congo.

In Zambia the RSZ locomotive fleet included former ZR locomotives, but the rest of the locomotive fleet of all three operations consisted of South African GM-EMD Class 34-200, 34-600 and 34-800 and GE Class 35-000 and 35-400 locomotives. These locomotives were sometimes marked or branded as either BBR or LOG or both, but their status, whether leased or loaned, was unclear since they were still on the TFR roster and still often worked in South Africa as well.^[1]

Zambia Railways, the state-owned holding company, resumed control of the Zambian national rail network on 11 September 2012. This followed the government’s decision to revoke the operating concession awarded to RSZ after Finance Minister Alexander Chikwanda claimed that RSZ had "blatantly disregarded the provisions of the agreement" and had been "acting in a manner prejudicial to the interests of Zambians”.^[6]

Sheltam

One of the Class 34-200 locomotives, no. 34-221, was sold to Sheltam where it became their number 4, having since been renumbered to 2601. Sheltam is a locomotive hire and repair company that undertakes complete operating contracts and maintenance contracts, based at the Douglas Colliery near Witbank in Mpumalanga. By the turn of the millennium Sheltam locomotives were operating at Randfontein Estates Gold Mine in Gauteng, and in Mpumalanga at Douglas and Vandyksdrift Collieries and at SAPPI, Ngodwana. They also operated on Spoornet’s Newcastle-Utrecht branch in KwaZulu-Natal and for a while on Kei Rail in the Eastern Cape. Outside South Africa they operate on the BBR, NLL and RSZ lines through Zimbabwe and Zambia and in the Congo.^[1][7]

Works numbers

The Class 34-200 builder's works numbers and deployment are listed in the table.^[1]

Liveries illustrated

The main picture shows the right side of no. 34-227 in the Spoornet orange livery. The left side and the NLPI LOG livery as applied to Class 34-200 locomotives are illustrated below.

• 

  No. 34-226 in Spoornet orange livery at Vryheid yard, Kwa-Zulu Natal, 16 August 2007

• 

  No. 34-209 with NLPI LOG emblems at Koedoespoort, Pretoria, 30 September 2009

See also

• Diesel-electric locomotive numbering and classification
• List of South African locomotive classes
• South African Class 34-000 (GE)
• South African Class 34-400 (GE)
• South African Class 34-500 (GE)
• South African Class 34-600 (GM-EMD)
• South African Class 34-800 (GM-EMD)
• South African Class 34-900 (GE)
• South African locomotive history

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: South African Class 34-200

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