Below is the second part of an article compiled by NZASM expert Robert de Jong in the late 1980s (the Nederlansche Zuid-Afrikaansche Spoorweg-Maatschappij (NZASM) was a Dutch company responsible for the construction and administration of many early Transvaal railway lines). The first piece looked at the structures and buildings of the Rand Tram while this one looks at the Southern Line. Very little NZASM architecture has survived on these lines due to rapid economic growth in the region over the decades.
When work on the construction of the Rand Tram started in 1889, it was already deemed highly probably that at no distant date the harbours of the Cape Colony and Natal would be connected with the Transvaal railways in order to reach the Witwatersrand. The Transvaal Government recognised the importance of the different lines being worked by the same company (NZASM), with the object to protect the Delagoa Bay Line against isolation and the loss of its privileged status.
In June 1890 the Volksraad sanctioned the construction of a railway line from Pretoria to the Vaal River, where it would join a railway which was projected through the Orange Free State to the harbours of the Cape Colony.
The Southern Line (Pretoria-Vaal River) consisted of three sections: the Rand Tram cut the line in two halves at Elandsfontein, and the third part was made up by the section Elandsfontein-Johannesburg, which would be doubled and thus no longer form part of the Rand Tram system.
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Robert De Jong is one of the foremost experts on the Nederlansche Zuid-Afrikaansche Spoorweg-Maatschappij (NZASM), a Dutch company responsible for the construction and administration of many early Transvaal railway lines. The following article, which looks at various structures associated with the Rand Tram, appeared in a number of publications in the late 1980s. In the introduction (not published below) De Jong expressed hope that the article would stimulate an interest in railway architecture which 'has been, like mining architecture, up to now a relatively neglected field of research in South Africa.'. Two and a half decades later we share these sentiments.
The Uitlander population on the Witwatersrand got their railway before the Government was able to run any train to Delagoa Bay. In the end this line, started as a humble transport arrangement for coal to the 'diggings', was to carry the heaviest rail traffic in the ZAR. The Rand Tram proved to be the first and one of the most successful exercises of railway construction in the Transvaal. And had not the abortive Jameson Raid influenced events during the years 1896-1899, the central station, Park Station at Johannesburg, would have boasted one of the finest railway buildings in all of South Africa.
North-eastern view of the covered platform of Park Station 1897 (NZASM 100)...
The following brief history of Windybrow, one of Johannesburg's great historic mansions, was compiled by B.L. Grant and appeared in the 1979 edition of the Johannesburg Historical Foundation's Journal 'Between the Chains'. The house is now home to the Windybrow Centre of the Arts (previously the Windybrow Theatre). Notices on the Centre’s website and facebook page indicate that it is closed for renovations and organisational ‘stabilisation’.
Windybrow, one of the last remaining mansions in Doornfontein, was the home of Theodore Reunert, founder of the engineering firm of Reunert and Lenz.
Doornfontein was a farm which stretched from End Street to Bedford View some six miles and was owned by F. Bezuidenhout who bought it in 1879, paying a span of oxen and a trek chain for it. The son, Barend Bezuidenhout, gradually sold the land to accommodate the rapidly expanding town.
Doornfontein was laid out as a township in 1889, largely by the Corner House Group, and it is thus one of Johannesburg’s oldest suburbs. Many of the mining magnates who developed the gold mines and the mining finance houses lived here- the Ecksteins, Sir George Albu, Theodore Reunart, Cecil Rhodes, John Hays Hammond (later Vice-President of the USA) and others. In 1900 most of these people moved to Parktown.
The Reunerts moved into Windybrow in 1896 and named the house after the home of the poet, Robert Southey, in the Lake District. It was designed by William Leck in a pseudo-Tudor style of architecture. The fittings and furnishings were brought...
In November 1987 members of the Johannesburg Historical Foundation paid a visit to the 'village' of Parkview. I use the word 'village' deliberately because this has always been a friendly suburb with a particular character of its own where I lived as a child and never visit without a feeling of nostalgia. After all, don't street names like Kilkenny, Kerry, Roscommon, Westmeath, Kildare and Wicklow evoke visions of somewhere green as shamrocks, fresh and soft as Irish mist, where the road rises to meet you and the sun shines warm upon your face?
Not all the names are Irish, however - inevitably, as one approaches the golf course, the Scottish influence becomes evident - Kinross, Selkirk, Crieff. The name of the suburb itself came about simply because it had a view of Herman Eckstein park, better known as the Zoo, which had been given to the people of Johannesburg in 1903 by the Wernher, Beit Company in memory of Hermann Eckstein who had died ten years previously.
All of the area had originally been part of the Geldenhuys farm, Braamfontein. Zoo Lake had been the main farm dam, the water coming from the Parktown Spruit, which arose in the Sachsenwald. The hippo pool in the Zoo is at a particularly strong eye of the Spruit.
