Wooden railroad Johore
| Wooden railroad track Johore Keretapi Kayu Johor كريتاڤي كايو جوهر |
|
|---|---|
| Route length: | Planned: 29 km Completed by 1875: 16 km |
| Gauge : | 1000 mm ( meter gauge ) |
The wooden railroad Johore ( Keretapi Kayu Johor , كريتاڤي كايو جوهر) was a wooden railroad built in the 1870s from Johor Bahru to Gunung Pulai in Johor British Malaysia . Originally a route length of 29 kilometers was planned, of which only 16 kilometers had been completed by 1875.
history
The railway was intended to connect Johor Bahru with an unspecified area 29 km (18 miles) towards Gunung Pulai . The line with wooden rails was built from 1869 and was partially completed in 1875, ten years earlier than the first railroad from Taiping to Port Weld . In 1889 it was no longer in use.
The idea came from the then Maharaja of Johor Abu Bakar after seeing some of the early trains there on a visit to England in 1866. The route was to connect the capital of the Sultanate of Johor, Johor Bahru , with Gunung Pulai , some 20 km away , where a sanatorium and a hill station were to be built as a summer resort because of the lower temperatures . There were no other breakpoints.
On July 24, 1869, an article appeared in the Singapore Daily Times that reported that the Maharaja of Johor opened the train "in the presence of a small group of Europeans and locals" and that a small Chaplin’s locomotive during the Construction work had been used.
In the following years the route was extended. By mid-1873 the line was already 9.7 kilometers long, and another 3.2 kilometers were almost complete. In 1875 it was reported that 16 km of track and sidings had been completed and the route along estates and plantations had been partially put into operation. The deepest incision was thirteen meters.
The next newspaper article reported in 1889 that the line would not be in service for the time being after a locomotive derailed on the termite- weakened tracks and fell into a depression.
Technical details
rails
The railway was unusual in that both the sleepers and the tracks, as well as the wedges used to secure the tracks to the sleepers, were made entirely of wood. Presumably 55 tons of teak were used per kilometer.
The track was to be made of ten foot long beams, six by four inches in cross-section, on round six- foot-diameter sleepers with two grooves the width of the rails in which the rails were wedged. The rails protruded 2 inches (50 mm) above the sleepers because of the flanges on the rail vehicles.
Originally the gauge was supposed to be three feet (914 mm), but later a thousand millimeters were favored to have the same gauge as in British India, where narrow gauge railways were built from 1872 onwards. There were reasons of cost, no gravel - bedding , but the thresholds were laid in the ground.
Rail vehicles
The type and size of the rail vehicles is not known. It was initially proposed to use a two-bogie Fairlie steam locomotive that had been successfully tested on the winding, steep lines of the Ffestiniog Railway in Wales , but there is no evidence of such a locomotive being exported to Malaya.
In 1875 the Maharaja of Johor acquired a used steam locomotive from British India (No. B27, 0-4-4T , Class B of the Indian State Railways , used as No. 89 on the Rajputana – Malwa line of the Rajputana State Railway , manufactured by Dübs and Company with the serial number 742 from 1874) presumably for use on the wooden railroad. The locomotive was later used on the Selangor State Railway under the name Lady Clarke and in the construction of the line from Klang to Kuala Lumpur and as a shunter of the Federated Malay States Railways before it was scrapped in 1912.
Individual evidence
- ^ A b The Johore Wooden Railway . December 21, 2004. Retrieved June 30, 2008.
- ^ The Evolution Of The Railway Industry In Johor: Lady Clarke. July 28, 2009. Retrieved November 30, 2017.