Steam Locomotives of the South African Railways (2 vols) (1971 and 1972)

Plastic-protected unclipped (R7.50) 2-colour dustjackets, brown cloth-boards, plain endpapers, b/w photographs as frontispieces. Each volumes had 144 pp of b/w-illustrated text and indexes, with the second volume having an appendix with corrections to the first.

CONDITION. Shelf-rubbing and other small flaws to the plastic overlays. For the rest, complete, unmarked and undiscoloured except for light sunning to the endpapers.

This two-volume set remains in constant demand because the writer's own history:

He grew up in the first decade of the 20th century in the then important railway town of Witbank, in present-day Mpumalanga [as did Rohan Vos of Rovos Rail] and, as he writes in the introduction to Vol 2:

• "... had personal experience of many of the locomotives which others know only from photographs: all the Mallets; the Garratts with the exception of the Class GA; the Kitson-Meyer; all the tender locomotives from Class 1 onwards; and all the Tanks.
• "I took my first locomotive photograph way back in 1922, a Class 16C, No 831, at Braamfontein, so this work is really the culmination of a life-long study of the SAR locomotives."

Holland expected that his research and writing for these two volumes would take six months, but it actually took eighteen times as long, although, as he wrote in the introduction to Vol 1, this period represented "amongst the most interesting years of my life".

A good, clean set.