Simon's Town

Simon's Town (Afrikaans: Simonstad), sometimes spelled Simonstown, is a town near Cape Town, South Africa, which is home to the South African Navy. It is located on the shores of False Bay, on the eastern side of the Cape Peninsula. For more than two centuries it has been an important naval base and harbour (first for the Royal Navy and now the South African Navy). The town is named after Simon van der Stel, an early governor of the Cape Colony.

Topography

The land rises steeply from near the water's edge and the picturesque village is boxed in along the shoreline by the heights above. The small harbour itself is not a particularly good natural harbour and is protected from swells by a breakwater that was built with thousands of huge blocks of sandstone quarried out of the face of the mountain above. Simon's Town is now in effect a suburb of greater Cape Town. The Simon's Town railway station is the terminus of the Southern Line, a railway line that runs south from the central business district of Cape Town. In places the railway line hugs the steep eastern shore of False Bay quite spectacularly and in bad weather waves and foam from some heavy swells will fly up and wet the trains.

Simon's Town railway station

Simon's Town railway station is a Metrorail railway station in the town of Simon's Town on the Cape Peninsula; it is the southern terminus of the Southern Line. The station is located between Station Road (the M4) and the beach.

The railway line from Fish Hoek into Simon's Town is single-track, but the station itself has three tracks; one track is served by a side platform next to the station building on Station Road, while the other two are served by an island platform connected by a pedestrian subway.

There were no trains running on the 6.3 km final section of the Cape Town suburban line between Fish Hoek and Simon's Town from November 2009 until February 2011, due to unusually high tides that piled heaps of sand on the line and caused serious damage beyond Glencairn, where structure beneath the track was undermined.

Vicinity

References