Ross Sadler

Indonesia had had a sugar industry for centuries, the Chinese being the millers in earlier times.  But when the colonial Dutch took over the industry in the 19th century, a rapid expansion took place.  Naturally, this expansion required greatly improved transport and fortuitously, the expansion took place at the same time that narrow gauge steam locomotive technology was being perfected.

The first locomotives to be used in Indonesia were small four-coupled engines, with only limited pulling power.  Naturally, there was an incentive to employ larger engines, but at the same time there was little chance of upgrading the track to mainline standards.  Given the typically small radius of the curves, Gölsdorf axles, which were used on 2-12-2T mainline locomotives, were generally unsatisfactory.  At the same time, the operators of the fledgling sugar tramways, wanted 100% weight to be available for adhesion.

Thus, various forms of articulated locomotive came to be the standard workhorse of the Indonesian sugar lines.  And the lines themselves became a living version of Otto Wiener’s Articulated Locomotives.  By far the most popular version of articulation was an 0-8-0 tank engine with Klien-Lindner axles.  In this arrangement, wheelsets 1 and 4 had hollow false axles, which were connected to the real axle by a central pivot.  The arrangement of course required the engine to be constructed with outside frames. Initially, all axles were equally spaced, but subsequently, Herr Luttermöller, the CME at Orenstein and Koppel (who were the major builder of engines for these lines) realized that axles 2 and 3 could be spaced well apart, so long as axles 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 were spaced closely together.  This gave the effect of a virtual bogie and allowed even much larger engines to negotiate the sharp curves of the lines.

Mallet articulation was another popular form with the colonial millers and a number of builders supplied engines of this kind to the sugar lines.  The standard format was an 0-4-4-0 Mallet tank engine, generally with inside frames on the front engine unit and outside frames on the rear engine unit, to accommodate the firebox.    It was found that with a heavy train in tow, the front engine unit was prone to derailment and so, many mills chose to run their Mallets bunker first to the mill and stack first to the field. Although less popular than the Klein-Lindner articulation, some mills such as Jatiroto and Ngadirejo had very large Mallet allocations.

Mention of the ingenious Herr Luttermöller, brings to mind yet another of his solutions which benefited a number of Indonesian mills, particularly as even larger locomotives were required.  The only way to spread the weight was to have ten-coupled rather than eight-coupled engines.  Again, the solution concerned the outermost axles, with only the middle three axles being connected by rods.  Axles 1 and 2 and axles 4 and 5 were connected by flexible gearboxes and the resulting engines had a 2-6-2 appearance, even though they were actually 0-10-0s.  Had the Indonesian industry not gone into decline in the late 1920s, his form of articulation would no doubt have become an even more significant part of the Indonesian sugar tramway scene.

Berlinermaschinenbau (formerly Schwarzkopf of Berlin) also produced a small number of designs for the Indonesian sugar tramways.  These included a chain driven double bogie locomotive with the boiler slung between the two bogies.  Simple piston valves (rather than sleeve valves) were operated by a modified Marshall valve gear and no attempt was made to have a driving compartment at each end!  The firm also supplied a number of large 0-10-0 tank engines, in which an ingenious device was used to straighten out the rods on curves.

Finally, another German firm Arn Jung, produced engines with Engerth tenders and their engines that ran at Soedhono Mill were the last locomotives of this type to operate in regular service, anywhere in the world.

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