[DSY011]

When I was a fireman at a small town call Dett or Dete as it is now named, I was in the railway club one night when one of my friends came in having just come off duty. It was quite late and he said he needed a drink to calm his nerves, he was a bit on the pale side. We asked what had upset him so much as to be honest, he was more than a bit pale, in fact he was quite white.
He said that he had just fired the Mail Train up from Sawmills to Dett and that they were traveling along at a fair lick when they hit something on the track. They had a small jolt and something flashed over the roof of the 15th class Garratt and landed in the tender. The train was brought to a quick stop and a light was aimed into the tender. There was a dead elephant in the tender.
Elephant are very hard to see at night even with the 250 watt head light on a Garratt. They don’t help themselves ether as they tend to throw dust over themselves and roll in the mud. The shape of the front tender also helped the elephant to roll over the engine. While the driver was checking the loco over for damage, the African passengers in the coaches behind the loco very soon had the elephant stripped down to the bone. Africans do not waste food and everything was taken. Even the bone makes good soup. When the train got moving again and Pete started firing, he found that there was a lot of blood and bit in the tender and on the coal, even though he had used the slack hose on it. It was not the fact that they had killed an elephant, or the accident its self that had upset him. It was the smell of the blood and bit cooking that turned his stomach. Needles to say, he did not keep that beer down ether. I wonder if today’s locos would stand up to an elephant strike. The Garrett only had the headlight bent, even the glass was undamaged.