A Robin Spencer photograph.
PTG Tours, a British railtour company, arranged a trip to Taiwan, South Korea and Sabah in Spring 2019. Of the 13 Malaysian provinces, Sabah is one of two (the other is Sarawak) on the island of Borneo. In the old days, Sabah was known as British North Borneo. My very well-travelled friend Robin Spencer, from Birmingham England, was a member of the PTG party.
Robin has given me permission to upload this photograph for him.
In Sabah, whose railway is metre gauge, a regular steam train runs between Tanjung Aru and Papar. The locomotive currently used was built by Vulcan Foundry, Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire, England in 1955. North Borneo (as it then was) ordered a batch of three – road numbers 6-014/015/016 are Vulcan serial numbers 6274-6276. 6-016 is significant in that it was the last (of more than 6000) steam locomotives built by Vulcan Foundry, a company that made sales to many countries around the world. Of these final three, 6-014/015 were built new as wood burners, like all previous North Borneo steam locomotives, whereas 6-016 was built new as an oil burner. It was later converted to be a wood burner. In steam days, wood was a readily-available source of locomotive fuel in Borneo.
In this picture, 6-016 has completed the journey and Robin has been fortunate to achieve a picture with the locomotive having stopped with ‘rods down’.
