Tiger Steam - Fiji (1/2)

In the mid-1950s 645km of steam-worked 2ft (610mm) gauge railways served five sugar mills owned by the Colonial Sugar Refining Co. Ltd of Australia (CSR Co) and there were then 50 steam locomotives.

The Fiji lines had many features in common with the CSR cane tramways in Queensland and northern New South Wales, Australia, so that identical locomotives from Hudswell Clarke and Fowler worked in both countries.

In the 1950s main line trains were worked by steam but there was a handful of internal combustion locomotives from Hudswell Clarke and Fowler for local traffic and Simplex tractors for shunting in mill yards. Diesels - mostly built in Australia - were introduced from 1955 and worked all traffic from the 1970s.

The most interesting feature of the Fiji lines was that the tramways serving the Lautoka and Rarawai Mills on Viti Levu were interconnected, giving an extensive system with a main line 200km long from Kavanangasau in the southwest of Viti Levu to Tavua in the north.

The Fiji sugar tramways used the portable track system for taking cane from the fields to the nearest point on a permanent line. The unbraked cane trucks were small and light and easily manhandled or hauled by bullocks, horses or tractors but trains could total up to 300 tons weight.

Cane traffic was controlled to maintain an even supply of cane to the mills and many of the trains moved at night. Lautoka was the biggest mill, crushing 650,000 tonnes a season in the 1950s. By the 1990s portable track was no longer used. Instead, cane trucks were carried between the nearest siding on the permanent tramway and cutting sites in the canefields on heavy trailers hauled by tractors.