Siding

The Midland line and the dorps it left behind. De Aar to East London, photographed since 2011.

They never closed it. They just stopped sending anything down it, and then one winter the grass was over the rails and nobody could say which year it had ended.

Willem Jacobs, stationmaster at Rosmead until 1988

1938

142 open, 88 of them with a stationmaster living on the platform.

Sidings on the Midland line

1961

97 open, 31 with a stationmaster living on the platform.

Sidings on the Midland line

1979

24 open, none with a stationmaster living on the platform.

Sidings on the Midland line

The line that stopped

Rosmead had four platforms and eleven trains a day. The last goods train went through it in 1994 and nothing was ever sent to fetch the levers.

The hotel bars are still open

Three of the eleven dorps still have a licensed bar. Two of them still have a barman.

The last stationmasters

Six men and one woman who worked the line until the timetable ran out from under them.

Why I keep going back

I grew up in Noupoort, in a house that shook twice a night. My father worked the shunting yard until 1991, and when the yard went quiet the town went quiet with it — first the cafe, then the second class at the school, then the hotel.

I started photographing sidings in 2011 to find out whether that had happened everywhere or only to us. It had happened everywhere. What surprised me was how little had actually been carried off: the signal levers are still in the boxes, the name boards are still bolted to the wall, and the platform clock at Sherborne is an hour slow rather than stopped.

I work on film because the negatives will outlast me, and because the pace suits the subject. Nobody is in a hurry at a place where nothing arrives.

Ledger

Begun 2011, still open. 63 dorps driven, 41 sidings photographed, 22 of them twice — ten years apart, in the same tripod holes where I could still find them. 4 800 negatives, 6×6 and 5×4, all black and white, all processed in the same bathroom in Cradock. 1 190 work prints. 214 exhibition prints, editions of twelve and never a thirteenth. Shown at Rhodes, at the Fourstreets gallery here, and once in the waiting room at Rosmead, which had 31 visitors in four days. Seven of the stationmasters in these photographs have died. Two of the sidings have been demolished. Nothing here is sold as a scan.

Prints and exhibitions

Silver gelatin, printed by hand in Cradock, editions of twelve.

Prints and dates

Studio 3, Fourstreets, 14 Bree Street, Cradock, Eastern Cape 5880
Open Thursday to Saturday, 10h00 to 15h00, and otherwise by arrangement
064 302 1187 · prints@siding.co.za
The darkroom door stays shut while a print is up. Knock anyway, I usually stop.