Page 36 - KBHA BULLETIN 1

33

site facing one of the finest sea shores of the world and miles of breaking waves they had put up

a paltry thing of red bricks and built a balcony upon it of cheap stucco-work when there is a stone
quarry at its very back door”.

Other rail lines proposed or constructed

It is easy for us today to forget that the line from Muizenberg to Simon’s Town was not the only

railway that was projected or built along the coastline. (Fig. 3.4.) Among the speakers at the
British Hotel at Simon’s Town on 1 December 1890 was one by Anders Ohlsson in which he

proposed that the line should be continued on as far as Miller’s Point, but no more was ever

heard of that idea.

In 1903 an Act of the Cape Parliament authorised a line from Fish Hoek to Kommetjie, to be

built and operated by the Kommetjie Railway Company. All the necessary surveys were done but
with the ending of the Anglo-Boer War the Cape Colony, and Cape Town in particular, fell on

hard times and money for the project failed to materialise and that was the end of another idea,

In June 1912 when the line from Wynberg to Muizenberg was being doubled and the new station

was being built, the General Manager of the CGR, Mr Hoy, promised that he would give a

sympathetic hearing to representations for the line along the False Bay coast to be extended from
Muizenberg in the direction of Strandfontein and a survey for such a line on to Somerset West

and Gordon's Bay was completed in 1918, but nothing further ever happened.

Despite these non-starters there were a number which did start. In 1896, when a quarry was

opened on Elsie's Peak, a trolley line was constructed from it down to the Fish Hoek Outspan

where the stone was transferred onto the CGR for onward transport elsewhere.

In 1902, when the Glencairn Glassworks were established, there appears to have been a narrow
gauge line from Glencairn station to the Glassworks and further on up the hill to where the sand