While the third Chinese QJ to be brought to the USA made it's way to Kansas over the past month, two more locos were also making a trans-continent journey.

In 2002 a 2-6-2 + 2-6-2 Beyer-Garratt class 14A and a South African 4-8-2 19D were purchased privately by New Zealander Ian Welsh from an industrial cement processing operation near Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.

They were then overhauled at Mr Welsh's expense over the next 12 months locally at the National Railway of Zimbabwe workshops in Bulawayo.

The locos were then stored under cover while export arrangements were made to ship them to New Zealand to join Mr. Welsh's extensive collection of New Zealand and South African locomotives.

See here: http://www.mainlinesteam.co.nz/locos.html

This took three years of negotiation and finally involved dissembling the locos into their major components, loading them into Gondola's then shipping them to Durban, South Africa for onward transit.

The locos arrived in New Zealand after a trans-shipment operation in Melbourne, Australia in mid December.

They finally arrived in the Wellington, New Zealand suburb of Plimerton where Mr Welsh's "Main Line Steam" operation has one of it's three depots in the country and were re-wheeled in the last days of 2007.

See here:

http://www.mainlinesteam.co.nz/gallery/ ... p?album=29

TH