Port Alfred Railway Line
railway line in South Africa
The Port Alfred Railway Line is a non-electrified railway line, that connects Alicedale with Grahamstown and Port Alfred in South Africa.
History
The construction of the line was part of the massive expansion of the Cape Colony's railway system, that was begun in the 1870s by Prime Minister John Molteno and the Cape Government Railways. The first section, connecting Alicedale and Grahamstown was completed in 1881. The remaining 68 km to Port Alfred were opened on 1 October 1883.
Passenger services were reduced to the Alicedale - Grahamstown section of the line in 1988 and the line was closed entirely in 1990. Service was restored between Alicedale and Grahamstown in 1995 and suspended again in 2008.
Operation
Until 2008 the line was served by one Shosholoza Meyl passenger train per day in each direction between Grahamstown and Alicedale. This train consists of one diesel locomotive and three passenger carriages. In Alicedale the service connects to the main line train to Johannesburg.
The section between Grahamstown and Port Alfred is not in use.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Port Alfred Railway Line” as railway line in South Africa. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as railway line in South Africa. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q7230467. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1881, 1883, 1988 and 1990.
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This entry incorporates text from “Port Alfred Railway Line” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.