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 Front of locomotive at left | |||||||||||||
 Cape Government Railways Railmotor | |||||||||||||
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Under theWhyte notation for the classification ofsteam locomotives,0-4-0+4 represents thewheel arrangement of noleading wheels, four powered and coupleddriving wheels on two axles and fourtrailing wheels on two axles mounted in a bogie.
The0-4-0+4 wheel arrangement was usually found onrailmotors, vehicles for passenger carrying that operated on routes where passenger numbers were light. It usually consisted of a single coach with its own prime mover.William Bridges Adams in theUnited Kingdom began building railmotors in small numbers as early as 1848.
A singleRailmotor was delivered to theCape Government Railways (CGR) in 1906. The railmotor was a self-contained motor-coach in which the locomotive and coach were embodied in a single vehicle, with a driver's station at the rear end of the coach for reverse running. The locomotive part was a 0-4-0 side-tank engine which was built byNorth British Locomotive Company, while the coach part on a single bogie was built byMetropolitan Amalgamated Railway Carriage & Wagon.[1][2]
In 1907, theCentral South African Railways (CSAR) acquired a single self-contained railmotor for the low-volume railmotor passenger service which had been introduced the previous year. It was a self-contained motor-coach with a 56-seat capacity in which the engine, boiler and coach were embodied in a single vehicle. While the engine part of the vehicle was built byKitson & Co, the 46 feet 11 inches (14,300 millimetres) long coach part was constructed byMetropolitan Amalgamated Railway Carriage & Wagon. To negotiate curves and points, the power unit could pivot like a bogie. The railmotor was erected at theSalt River shops of the CGR in Cape Town and entered service on the CSAR on 10 August 1907.[3][4][5]