1897 in South Africa

	1897 in South Africa
1894 1895 1896 « 1897 » 1898 1899 1900
List of years in South Africa

Events

April

• 21 – Sir Alfred Milner becomes High Commissioner of South Africa and Governor of the Cape Colony.

May

• 5 – Port Elizabeth is flooded.

Unknown date

• Bergville is established in the foothills of the Drakensberg mountains in Natal.

Births

• 3 July – Ludwig Wybren Hiemstra, Afrikaans linguist and editor of the Bilingual Dictionary, is born in Lydenburg.
• 26 October – James Leonard Brierley Smith, ichthyologist, is born in Graaff Reinet.

Railways

Railway lines opened

• 13 March – Cape Western – Mafeking to Ramatlabama at the Bechuanaland border, 16 miles (25.7 kilometres).^[1]
• 3 August – Transvaal – Frederikstad to Klerksdorp, 43 miles (69.2 kilometres).^[1]
• 1 October – Cape Midland – Rosmead Junction to Middelburg, 7 miles 3 chains (11.3 kilometres).^[2]
• 1 December – Natal – Isipingo to Park Rynie, 27 miles 48 chains (44.4 kilometres).^[1]
• 3 December – Natal – Verulam to Tongaat, 12 miles (19.3 kilometres).^[1]
• 15 December – Natal – Thornville Junction to Richmond, 17 miles 17 chains (27.7 kilometres).^[1]

Locomotives

Cape

Two new Cape gauge locomotive types enter service on the Cape Government Railways (CGR):

• Six 4th Class 4-4-2 Atlantic type tender locomotives on the section from Kimberley southwards.^[3]:57–59
• A third batch of fifty-five 6th Class 4-6-0 steam locomotives. In 1912 they would become Class 6B on the South African Railways.^{[3]:46–47, 57[4][5][6]:41–44}

Transvaal

• The independent Pretoria-Pietersburg Railway in the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (Transvaal Republic) purchases a 4-6-0 35 Tonner tank locomotive named Portuguese from the Lourenco Marques, Delagoa Bay and East Africa Railway in Mozambique.^{[3]:118–119}

• Arthur Koppel, acting as agent, imports a number of Dickson built 0-4-2ST narrow gauge saddle tank steam locomotives to mines on the Witwatersrand.^{[6]:100–101}

References