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Tersana Baru Sugar Mill |
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Tersana Baru was a large mill with an allocation of steam locomotives to match. At the time when I first visited in 1978, much of the cane in the surrounding estate was still coming in by rail and there were relatively few diesels. A special feature of operation was the amount of cane which was brought in by rail from the former mill at Ketanggungan Barat. That is covered in detail in another dedicated section, but locomotives were sent from Tersana Baru to the site of the former mill at Luwung Gajah where they would take over for last few kilometres. Over the years, locomotives from one part of the system might not only work through but they were also often transferred on a temporary basis. When you throw in the locomotives which arrived from Gempol and a crazy year when much of the fleet was temporarily renumbered you have a compiler's nightmare! At the time it all made sense and I had no trouble keeping track, but that was all up to 25 years ago. Over the years, as everywhere, more and more cane came in by road (including finally from Ketanggungan Barat). New Japanese diesels arrived in the 1980s and they quickly took over the remaining field workings and the transfer trains from Luwung Gajah. For most of steam's final years, locomotives were confined to the mill yard where they shunted road deliveries and transferred cane to the mill, an intensive operation which nevertheless always saw far more locomotives in steam than was strictly necessary. Meanwhile the mill was usually running well below capacity and this brought about bagasse shortages. The steam locomotives having once burned oil, went from bagasse to wood and the large trees in the yard started to come down. Amazingly some steam activity continued into the 21st century but by the end of the first decade, the curtain had come down. Not only was steam taken out of use and most scrapped but the entire railway system including the yard was lifted. When I last visited in 2010 cane was being dumped from trucks into a large concrete area and being pushed into the mill by the equivalent of JCB front loaders. As the mill itself was rapidly replacing its remaining stationary steam engines, I was happy to leave at the end of the visit knowing that I would never need to come back. Click here for a video of the actual mill in operation. |
