Industrial Railways Beni Enzar, Oriental, Morocco

Hi Guys

This is a just out of interest thread, some time ago I was given a photo of the old 60cm gauge Decaville (this could be the wrong spelling by the way) Mallets from the French military railways in Morocco I have always been keen to acquire more info about them.

Over on Rob and Yuehong Dickinson website international steam

Surviving Steam in the Eastern Rif (Morocco)

He had a bit about the industrial railways of the ref and I was wondering if anyone on this group had been there of late and I was wondering if anything was left of the locos

Thanks in advance for any help

Colin

 

Hello Colin,

I am sorry to tell you that the locos that you are referring to were abandoned and subsequently heavily stripped by the locals some years ago and the small half round house demolished. A very sad end to some very interesting machines. How these engines were missed by the preservation world is a real tragedy.

Cheers

Alan

 

Hello again Colin,

A couple of Google Earth photos of the SEFERIF loco shed at Beni Enzar. In the first you can see the locos in the fast disappearing half-roundhouse, in the second photo it has all gone, a real shame.






cheers

Alan

 

Some more information in Spanish, however, the photos are self explanatory.

http://personal.telefonica.terra.es/web/ferrocarriles/requiem.pdf

Cheers

Alan

 

Thanks Alan.

Yes very sad indeed, in fact, I can say that when I first came across these locos, I did inform the then Management committee of the L&BR Association about them. I think that was before the use of email had taken off.

I know some will say that we can't save everything, and when the time comes, we could build replicas. The thing is should we be trying to save what is still out there first of all?

The growth of (any gauge) new builds is not going to stop tomorrow and I am sure we have had this discussion on another thread.

My view is that may be it is time to think about creating a separate National Narrow Gauge Centre on the lines of the N.R.M.

Maybe it is one of the last area’s the NRM would like to consider helping to set up they already have Shildon and of course York

Besides taking the different loading and track gauges in to consideration, I am sure that we are missing a trick here by not having a national education centre for Narrow Gauge Railways and its equipment. What does everyone else think is it possible that something like that could be set up?

Regards

Colin