As already noted, the British administration that had fought a war to help advance civilization north of the Vaal River, was initially not very enthusiastic about the idea of providing third-class passengers with drinking water. Matters improved slowly after Union, but throughout the 1920s and 1930s there were complaints about faulty water pumps on passenger coaches that remained unrepaired for weeks on end, while at Komatipoort there was a time when the water quality was officially condemned.

Some of the Johannesburg industrialists, men of a supposedly ‘progressive’ stripe, better-educated English-speaking urban sophisticates with supposedly more enlightened ‘liberal’ views, were content to chide or dismiss Afrikaans-speaking railway administrators and poor white workers as ‘backvelders’ and ‘wheel-tappers’, while out at Ressano Garcia their own employees, the black living dead extruded from coal and gold mines, were being hauled through the coastal bush in hammocks and resided for the loneliest journey of all.

By mid-1963 the full down-train, replete with two Red Cross coaches, a ghostly spectre most often glimpsed gnawing away at the tracks of the great Eastern Main Line during the early hours of the morning, was seen less often. The 307 and its hospital-on-wheels without doctors or patients continued to do it as it had done for half a century, ferrying the living dead and the mentally impaired across the River Styx at Komatipoort/ Ressano Garcia. The down-train had often left the souls uncoupled from the bodies of the returning migrants, but that was not its full repertoire. It was also the vehicle by which men were separated from their savings and few worldly goods.

Please advise,’ wrote the Secretary of the Chamber of Mines, ‘whether it is possible to produce evidence in substantiation of the statement that the pilferage complained of actually occurred while the luggage was in the custody of the Railway Administration, and whether the luggage was booked by the natives concerned before boarding the train.’ It was a fool’s errand. In the late 1950s there was another spate of thefts, and even in those cases where the Railway Administration did accept responsibility for the loss of goods, it generally reduced to pay compensation on items of clothing unless documentary evidence as to the precise value of the goods lost could be provided by workers who were, almost to the man, perfectly illiterate.

For half a century, African miners on the up-train were never referred to as ‘miners’ but as ‘East Coast Boys’; the living dead and terminally ill Mozambicans on the down-train were never referred to as ‘patients’ but as ‘rejects’ or ‘sick boys’; and the Sul do Save migrants never qualified as ‘passengers’ but were ‘special fares’ or ‘Bantu’. Racism, a product of the mind, perverts the thinking of the oppressors and the oppressed alike.