Another New England. Leitz Telyt-V 280mm.

It's snowing a-gain, a blizzard in fact.  New Englanders, and Bostonians in particular are utterly done with winter.  I was at work all day.  We closed late again and there were no fresh Blips to be had that didn't involve snow.
I'm kinda going out on a limb by posting this image since it was taken on Saturday, May 13, 1989.  I hear the black helicopters piloted by the Blip Police overhead as I write this blurb.  My justification for this infraction is this:  we post "journals" of our daily lives and I believe we are allowed once in a while to cast a glance over our shoulders which will warm our hearts when a particular day has nothing memorable to offer.
A travel companion and I were driving around South Africa.  I had seen this place on the map called "New England" and had determined that we absolutely had to see this spot that presumptously called itself New England in the middle of nowhere, South Africa.  It turned out to be a remote siding on one of the most fascinating railway lines in the world, running from Aliwal North to Barkly East high in the foothills of the Drakensberg mountains.  When the railway was being planned in about 1910, there was to be quite an elaborate alignment which involved a tunnel through a sandstone mountain.  The track exited the mountain on the face of a sheer cliff where there was a bridge to be crossed before it looped and swooped its way up the side of the next mountain.  It turns out that the parts of the bridge were on a ship bound from the U.K to South Africa which was sunk by a German U-Boat during WW1.  The engineers went back to the drawing board and came up with an alternate alignment which involved the railway having to zig-zag up the side of the mountain from the river valley below.  Unlike a serpentine road, where vehicles round a hairpin bend and continue up the next gradient, a train has to proceed into a dead-end section.  Points (or switches) are changed behind the last coach and the train then reverses up the next slope.  It does this eight times in all, see-sawing its way to the terminus at Barkly East.  This engineering feat was regarded as a temporary measure until more bridge parts could be acquired.  But the line never generated enough revenue to justify the cost and the reverses stayed until the line was closed in 2001.  The story is tragic both for the manner in which the closure came to pass and for the railway fans of the world:  A special tourist train had been organized to run along the line.  Somewhere along the way a drunk passenger managed to gain access to the cab of the steam engine pulling the train.  The driver was overpowered, the train went out of control, came off the tracks and plunged into a ravine.  Several people were killed and the railways administration decided that the line was too much of a liability to be operated as a tourist attraction.  That was that.  Here is a link to a YouTube clip showing this incredible railway as it was.
This photograph was taken on film using my Leica M2 and the 280mm lens whose images have filled the pages of this journal many times before.  As is the nature of big tele lenses, the perspective is drastically foreshortened which adds to the effect of this vista: the Witberge (mountains) in the background, the siding in the middle distance and the farmer and his shepherd working their flock in tandem in the foreground, a moment in time captured on a chilly yet sunny Saturday morning.