Monday 2 August – Situbondo to Kediri via Gending and Gempolkrep

The 'post-tour' tour involves a small group returning to Jakarta via bus retracing a lot of the journey, revisiting some mills and also calling at some new ones.
Today was the longest road leg of the trip. On the way we went back to Gending, which most people had not visited with me the previous week. (Having a sugar mill machinery group as well as a cane railway group meant that some choices had been possible.)
I took this photo to show the Islamic type of school uniform that most girls do not wear, although a sizeable minority do. Even in schools where Islamic dress seems predominant, you often see a few girls wearing a secular version.

There was a fair amount of activity involving three locomotives between unloading station and the mill.

We saw loco number 1 haul a train of portable track into the mill yard. This had obviously just been lifted from a harvesting site somewhere. It then promptly departed with a field train of empty wagons.

This was one of the more mean-looking volcanoes we have passed.

We arrived at Gempolkrep late, and as predicted the formalities took a lifetime to complete before we could get off the bus. The light was already going fast but we were delighted to see this vintage internal-combustion engined locomotive of German ancestry 'preserved' in the grounds. This was of similar design to those used by the German Army in the Great War and must be more than 80 years old.

We found a large quantity of out of use steam locomotives in the shed and some diesel action. The large Japanese diesels here are different because they do not have outside coupling rods. It was a very hurried visit and we got to Kediri after 7 o'clock and well after dark.