Making Histories in Transport Museums 0718501063, 9780718501068

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Making Histories in Transport Museums

Making Histories in Museums Series Editor: Gaynor Kavanagh Also in the series: Making City Histories in Museums, edited by Gaynor Kavanagh and Elizabeth Frostick Making Early Histories in Museums, edited by Nick Merriman Making Histories in Museums, edited by Gaynor Kavanagh

Making Histories in

Transport Museums Colin Divall and Andrew Scott

Leicester University Press London and New York

Leicester University Press A. Continuum imprint The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX 370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017-6503 First published 2001 © Colin Divall and Andrew Scott 2001 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-7185-0106-3 (hardback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Divall, Colin. Making histories in transport museums/Colin Divall and Andrew Scott. p. cm.—(Making histories in museums) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7185-0106-3 1. Transportation museums. 2. Historical museums. 3. Museum techniques. 4. Material culture. I. Scott, Andrew, 1949- II. Title. III. Series. TA1006.A1 D58 2001 388'.075—dc21

Typeset by BookEns Ltd, Royston, Herts. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd. www.biddles.co.uk

00-053495

Contents

Illustrations foreword by Gaynor Kavanagh Acknowledgements 1 Transports of delight: museums, visitors and enthusiasts

vi vii ix 1

2 Trains, planes, cars and boats: collecting and displaying vehicles

39

3 Travels in the past: exhibiting social histories of transport

78

4 Theories and things: history and the changing role of the object

114

5 To travel hopefully . . . : heritage transport as museums

159

6 Moving on: a future for transport museums

189

bibliography Museum and exhibition catalogues and guidebooks; contemporary descriptions, reports and surveys

196

Newspapers and periodicals

198

Books

198

Articles, essays and exhibition reviews

203

Dissertations and theses

214

Other print sources

215

Other media

215

Index

217

Illustrations

2.1

The Museum of British Transport, Clapham

51

2.2

Musee National de PAutomobile, Mulhouse

53

2.3

Bugatti sports cars, Mulhouse

53

2.4

HT Museum, Copenhagen

55

2.5

The Warehouse, National Railway Museum

57

2.6

Mallard at the National Railway Museum

67

2.7

The Main Hall, National Railway Museum

69

3.1

The Station Hall, National Railway Museum

85

3.2

'Palaces on Wheels', National Railway Museum

88

3.3

'Women at work on the railways', National Railway Museum

105

4.1

APT-E

127

4.2

Referential markings - Chessie System

134

4.3

Edmondson card ticket

139

4.4

'The Garden', National Railway Museum

144

4.5

Trippers on the Lynton and Barnstaple Railway

149

4.6

Visitors in the first-class compartment

150

Foreword Gaynor Kavanagh Museums are an engaging, challenging, memorable means of discovering episodes of past human experience. Their appeal to all the senses, their location within free time and leisure choices, their increased sophistication in terms of collection care and communication — all have a part to play in this. Museums can produce histories that are compelling and vivid, evocative and affecting, argumentative and enriching. They can help to cross cultural and generational divides, open forms of learning otherwise denied, and accommodate personal as well as social encounters. They can be insightful commentators, great teachers, debaters of the best and the worst of human history. They can provoke the imagination, move people to tears, raise expectations. And by the same token, they can be none of these things and only confuse, appropriate and deny. Somewhere between the exhilaration and the disappointment lies the field of museum studies, which seeks to gain understanding of the educational, social and cultural roles of museums and their assumed and actual functions within modern life. The task bridges the professional and the academic, the theoretical and the practical: both 'why' and 'how' questions need to be asked. The facility to deconstruct brings with it the responsibility to reconstruct, in order to find more successful and effective ways forward. The Making Histories series was devised to explore both product and process, the ways histories are made in museums and the nature of popular and individual engagement with them. Our premiss is that museums operate dynamically on many different levels, providing opportunities which are seldom uniform and often beyond direct comparison. Broad trends may be discerned and certain generalizations made; ideology and culture saturate museums and shape the visit. Yet the neat theoretical patterns are disrupted by alternative readings, or none at all, and the powerful figure in this is often the visitor. As a result, the fascination in museum practice shifts from the general to the specific and often lies in the anomaly, the variant and the development, which shifts the boundaries forward. In the growing literature on museums, studies of collections devoted to the traditions of art and anthropology have attracted the greatest cri-

Foreword tical interest. The politics of them raise not just passions but now wellrehearsed and at times well-worn debates about appropriation of culture and the articulation of knowledge. In comparison, collections of cars, trains, lorries, planes and bikes seemingly raise the passions of the few. Whereas academic interest in technology in the context of culture has become increasingly active, the devotee of transport collections and museums is more than likely to be caricatured as a 'rivet-counter', hellbent on correcting a minor technical indiscretion in a museum label. Besides demeaning people with a legitimate and vigorous personal interest, such a view also underestimates the challenge of studying such collections. The questions they raise are socially relevant and directed to the heart of our cultural experience. Few forms of contemporary collections embody so much about human experience as do those devoted to transport. Even so, this is often overlooked and indeed not drawn out in the way that transport museums are researched and displayed. The internal dynamics of transport museums have characteristics not shared by other types of museums, not least because of the sheer (often overwhelming) size of the objects. The study of them would seem to prompt a catalogue of omissions, which would do little to advance their cause. It is to our benefit therefore that Colin Divall and Andrew Scott have taken on the challenge of writing about transport collections and museums in the Making Histories series. They provide a particularly informed examination of this genre of museum and set out insightful and progressive arguments for their development. Gaynor Kavanagh Falmouth, February 2001

viii

Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time in the writing. While its immediate origins lie in an invitation from Gaynor Kavanagh - the most supportive editor one could hope for - to contribute a specialist volume to the 'Making Histories in Museums' series, our professional interest and involvement with transport museums dates back many years. Over that period numerous colleagues and students have shaped our thinking on the ways museums represented the contribution of transport to life in the past, and how they might do so in the future. We have also been greatly helped by others in gathering material on the activities, past and present, of transport museums. The preparation of this volume has benefited in these diverse ways particularly from contributions by Phil Atkins, Michael Bailey, Ed Bartholomew, Alan Bennett, Andrew Bickerstaffe, Sandra Bicknell, Winstan Bond, Anthony Coulls, Simon Ditchfield, D. Drummond, Lawrence Fitzgerald, Sophie Forgan, Richard Gibbon, Ralph Harrington, Robert Hicks, Stephen Hoadley, Chris Hogg, Rachel Holland, Dieter Hopkin, Jill Murdoch, Peter Northover, Lynn Patrick, David Pearson, Marie-Noelle Polino, Gaby Porter, George Revill, Barbara Schmucki, the late Michael Stratton, John Tillman, Peta Turvey, Dave Wilson, Birgitte Wistoft and Bill Withuhn. Our arguments have also benefited greatly from discussions with colleagues at seminars, colloquia and conferences held at Cornell University, Glasgow Museums Service, the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, the National Railway Museum and the University of York, and at meetings organized by the International Association of Transport and Communication Museums, the National Council on Public History and the Society for the History of Technology. Finally we should like to thank our partners, Karen Hunt and Margaret Scott, for their forbearance over many years as we have arranged holidays and diverted journeys miles from the quickest route in order to visit yet another transport museum. Without their support (and that of several cats) and comments, this book could not have been written. Colin Divall Andrew Scott January 2001

In memory of Professor Jack Simmons, 1915-2000, transport historian, mentor and an enthusiastic advocate for transport museums worldwide

1 Transports of delight: museums, visitors and

enthusiasts A museum of transport! The idea is surely a contradiction in terms, an absurdity. For a museum seems to most of us to be something static - it freezes and preserves things - whereas transport moves, or it is not transport. Jack Simmons, Transport Museums in Britain and Western Europe, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1970, 17.

Transport museums matter, or they should do since they are among the most numerous and popular of museums. Definitions vary widely and so estimates are always loose, but Britain probably has the greatest concentration with perhaps one in ten, or around 250, of all museums in the country having significant transport collections.1 But the sheer size of the USA means that in absolute terms most transport museums and collections are located there. For example, there are over 800 maritime museums, collections and sites in the world, of which just over 40 per cent are in the USA, nearly 30 per cent in Britain, Ireland and the surrounding islands, about 17 per cent in continental Europe, and the rest scattered throughout the rest of the world. The distribution of the 1100 or more aviation museums and collections in the world is not much different, although the proportion in Asia, at about 10 per cent, is notably higher. The division of railway, tramway and road transport museums is probably similar, although reliable figures are harder to come by. The USA has about 200 railroad collections plus a further 18 trolley museums, while a 1990 guide identified 100 railway and tramway museums in continental Europe. Australia boasts no fewer than 26 railway and 13 tramway museums; at least four countries in Latin America have railway museums; and five are located in each of the continents of Africa and Asia.2 Since in general the boundaries between museums and other forms of heritage attractions are becoming more and more blurred, there is much to be lost if the lines are drawn too firmly in relation to transport. Including heritage transport - the operation of archaic vehicles for public display or carriage - further increases the number of places in which public histories may be made. The need for dedicated specialist infrastructure makes heritage railways and tramways easy to identify. Britain has over 100, the USA about 120, plus a dozen trolley lines, and even Australia supports no fewer than 53 railways and 11 tramways.3 1

Making histories in transport museums The popularity of these attractions is equally impressive. The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum - which, unlike most transport museums, does not have an admission charge - was said in the early 1990s to be the most popular museum in the world with attendances at times in excess of one million per month!4 In the second half of the decade museums such as Britain's National Railway Museum (NRM), the California State Railroad Museum and Germany's Auto und Technik Museum (Motor and Technical Museum) claimed annual visitations of around 500,000, while Britain's National Motor Museum was not far behind at 400,000 plus. Mystic Seaport, Connecticut, arguably the premier maritime attraction in the USA, welcomed about 425,000 visitors each year throughout the 1990s. Lesser attractions achieve audiences that would be the envy of many museums; for instance, in the late 1990s, annual visitation at the St Louis Museum of Transportation was around 160,000; at the Rail Road Museum of Pennsylvania about 140,000; and at Britain's National Tramway Museum, 100,000. Including heritage transport makes the figures even larger. In 1995 for example, some 5.6 million people paid to travel on Britain's 101 heritage railways, while an estimated 1.25 million also visited the lines without travelling. In the late 1990s one leading heritage line in the USA, Pennsylvania's Strasburg RailRoad, carried some 450,000 passengers annually, while the Puffing Billy Railway in Victoria, Australia, attracted well over 200,000.5 Visitors and the public history of transport Clearly archaic forms of transport are of interest to large numbers of people. Why? Unfortunately there is little research on the question, and even less that is theoretically or methodologically sophisticated. But studies of other kinds of history museums and heritage attractions give some idea. To state the obvious, people visit for all sorts of reasons, many of which have little or nothing to do with finding out about the past. For example, in a 1995 survey of visitors to British heritage railways, only 8 per cent specifically cited an interest in the history of railways, while a smallscale study of a minor railway museum found that most visitors were interested in the 'novelty of steam train rides rather than the representation of a railway's past'.6 On the other hand, there is an increasing volume of evidence suggesting that whether or not they visit museums regularly or at all, a clear majority of the public in industrialized countries is interested in 'the past', chiefly as a way of providing both knowledge of how we have come to live as we have and lessons for the future.7 One clue to this apparent paradox is the way that 'the past' is presented in museums and other sites. The very term 'public history' and phrases such as Michael Kammen's 'publicly present past' or Michael Bommes and 2

Museums, visitors and enthusiasts

Patrick Wright's 'public historical sphere' nicely capture the sense of a distinctive way of knowing the past that results partly from visitors' interactions with exhibitions and other ways of displaying the past, such as drama. Lois Silverman's review of research on visitors undertaken up to the late 1990s found that most visitors feel distanced from 'history', perceiving it as something remote. Similarly, Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen's survey of 1500 Americans interviewed in the mid-1990s suggests that although they feel a strong sense of the past, they do so in terms of 'how', 'when' or 'with whom', not 'why?'8 People respond much more positively to a past they perceive in personal terms, as relevant to their own lives. As Silverman remarks, the more people can relate the subject to their own lives or ancestry, the less they think of it as history per se and, more importantly, the more enthusiasm and interest they seem to hold for the subject.9 One implication is that they also feel removed from the largely impersonal, abstract and unfamiliar explanations of much academic thought, a point bluntly made by John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking in their extensive studies of museum usage.10 Many writers now theorize history museums and heritage more generally as sites that help to create and sustain a sense of identity through the individual and shared memories they trigger. Personal memories, of course, help to shape one's own sense of individuality. But as sites of collective or popular memories, museums display and legitimate objects of cultural significance (however this is defined) through which visitors can also acknowledge, commemorate, celebrate or perhaps even reflect on their membership of one or more collectives or groups. Personal and collective memories can come together, making and reproducing the shared identities that help to define us all as social beings. Equally, however, museums can be places which exclude individuals and social groups from the collective memories and identities on display.11 'What is at stake in struggles for control over objects and the modes of exhibiting them,' argues one commentator, 'finally, is the articulation of identity'. All exhibitions 'represent identity, either directly, through assertion, or indirectly, by implication'.12 These linked senses of belonging and exclusion are intimately bound up with the ways in which the past is represented through myth, a crucial element in the way we all define ourselves as social beings. Myth, or 'heritage' in one sense of that much abused term, is often contrasted to 'history'. The distinction is a subtle and important one, and it is worth spending a moment understanding it.13 In David Lowenthal's formulation the essential difference is between a representation of the past oriented primarily towards the many and often conflicting purposes of the public 3

Making histories in transport museums present ('heritage') and that which tries - although always and necessarily with less than total success - to understand the past in its own terms ('history'). Thus in its application to the public or collective realm, 'heritage now mainly denotes what belongs to and certifies us as communal members', it 'passes on exclusive myths of origin and continuance, endowing a select group of people with prestige and common purpose'.14 For this reason the truth or falsity of public representations of the past is, as Patrick Wright remarks,'often peripheral to their practical appropriation in everyday life' in popular or collective memory.15 Myth/heritage, in Lowenthal's sense, wins out over 'history'.16 Such misrepresentation of 'the past' has, not surprisingly, been widely condemned. As Lowenthal puts it, the 'crux of most aspersions against heritage is that it undermines 'real' history, defiling the pristine record that is our rightful legacy': Critics who idealize this unsullied past view history as true because innate, heritage as false because contrived. History is the past that actually happened, heritage a partisan perversion. Substituting an image of the past for its reality, in the typical plaint, heritage effaces history's intricate coherence with piecemeal and mendacious celebration, tendering comatose tourists a castrated past.17 Criticisms of heritage as 'bad history' have often extended to seeing it as a biased ideological representation of the past sustaining the interests of the dominant social class or classes.18 But this line of critique is increasingly tempered by a realization that an engagement with the past in terms of modern-day existential needs is inescapable. 'Heritage,' Lowenthal writes, 'no less than history, is essential to knowing and acting. Its many faults are inseparable from heritage's essential role in husbanding community, identity, continuity.. ,'.19 Acknowledging this need not mean abandoning a critical attitutude towards myth/heritage. But it clearly makes the job of developing public histories that are both critical and genuinely popular a much more difficult one that merely 'getting the history right'. Is it at all realistic to ask that transport museums contribute to this task? Some cultural critics argue that all 'museums function largely as repositories of the already known".7® But transport museums do not have to be places that just reflect back at visitors their personal and collective memories, their cultural preconceptions, assumptions and prejudices. As Lowenthal and others often remark, the past is rather like a foreign country. It might be a cultural resource that is commonly repatriated to the present and then domesticated in myths as it inevitably becomes bound up with the making and remaking of identities of all kinds. But under the right circumstances — to claim Ivan Karp's insights for our different purpose - 'the shock of non-recognition' can encourage and 4

Museums, visitors and enthusiasts

enable museum visitors to extend and re-order their comprehension of the past, perhaps even bringing myth more closely into alignment with historical 'reality'.21 Potentially people could be attracted to transport museums to make and explore more critical popular histories of transport and travel, but only if exhibitors — public historians, curators, designers and everyone else involved in the making of museum displays - can find ways of relating people's personal sense of the past to the wider historical themes of which they have no direct experience. An important element of this will be to involve visitors more actively in the process of creating their own understanding of the past. Doing so involves moving away from the model of the museum as a temple, in which a supposedly objective model of the past is held up for edification, towards a vision of it as a forum in which confrontation, experimentation and debate go on between exhibitors and visitors.22 This is a hard but not impossible task. Research suggests that, at their best, museum exhibitions can excite people's curiosity, intrigue and challenge them, and help them make startling connections between what they already 'know' and what is contained in or suggested by the displays. In other words there is plenty of evidence that museums and similar institutions can work as sites of 'learning'.23 Much turns on what is meant by words such as 'know' and 'learning'. They often have unhelpful connotations of the sort of formal pedagogic methods experienced at school or even college. 'Learning' in any museum is informal learning if it is anything at all - voluntary and, largely, selfdirected. These points are crucial. Visitors are in a real sense in the driving seat. As we have suggested, the personal agenda they bring with them to a museum or heritage attraction play a large part in what they will attend to during a visit. Visitors' attitudes, emotions, knowledge and sense of intellectual confidence all inform the ways in which they approach displays, and help to shape the understanding and feelings - or 'knowledge' — they take away. Museum learning is as much about feeling, emotion and desire - the affective dimension - as it is about formal categorization and analysis. Only if visitors can connect or engage with an exhibition's themes and treatment — that is, only if they can first recognize elements of what they already know, understand and feel - will there be any chance of them experiencing the 'shock of the new' positively, of them reaching out to expand their understanding of the past. Moreover this need not be a passing phenomenon; visitors do seem to retain, and often for a long time, vivid memories of visits. And this can happen in transport museums. Helen Edmondson's study of our own institution, the NRM, found that not only were the overwhelming majority of visitors 'very interested' in the museum's themes but the exhibitions did change perceptions of the railway's past.24 5

Making histories in transport museums The ideal museum then is one that allows visitors, each in his or her own way, to traverse three routes to the past - relics, memory and history. As Lowenthal writes, these are 'best traversed in combination': Each route requires the others for the journey to be significant and credible. Relics trigger recollection, which history affirms and extends backwards in time. History in isolation is barren and lifeless; relics mean only what history and memory convey. Indeed, many artifacts originated as memorial or historical witnesses. Significant apprehension of the past demands engagement with previous experience, one's own and others', along all three routes.25 Museums should only be celebrated in an unqualified way as sites of popular culture when visitors are provided with the resources needed to allow critical reflection on the mythical pasts of contemporary society. One of the purposes of this book is to explore how this might be achieved in transport museums. 'Reading' exhibitions Knowing more about how visitors use exhibitions and other forms of display, such as drama, to relate to the past is crucial if transport museums are to become sites of critical popular histories. The messy, practical task of working with visitors to help them develop a sense of history depends partly on understanding how individuals and groups, bound together and divided by social class, gender, ethnicity, age and so on, create shared meanings from their encounters with representations of the past. It is unwise to assume that one's own understanding, or 'reading', of an exhibition mirrors everyone else's.26 But this book is a preliminary to the detailed research that is needed, not a report on it. Developing a significant body of knowledge about visitors' perceptions of modern transport exhibitions will be a slow and costly affair.27 And apart from spectacular, wellrecorded events like the Great Exhibition of 1851, studying the history of perceptions of transport displays presents huge and probably insurmountable problems in obtaining data about visits made long ago.28 Thus in this book we essay an analysis of what it is museums are attempting to do in their exhibitions, and how and why they set about this, based partly on our own experience of creating and visiting displays, and partly on historical inquiry. This is worthwhile because making popular critical histories of transport remains in no small measure a matter of intellectual content. Knowing more about the ideas embodied in exhibitions, both in the present and in the past, provides a baseline from which one may subsequently judge how well museums succeed in their aims and what needs to be done in the future.29 Even those cultural

6

Museums, visitors and enthusiasts

critics who believe it makes no sense to talk of an exhibition's content divorced from an audience might find some value in our observations as hypotheses to be tested against visitors' perceptions. However, the theoretical model of communication that informs this book assumes that an exhibition's meanings are not infinite. An exhibition may mean different things to different people, but its meanings are circumscribed; while visitors may resist or reject these, they can only do so by drawing upon cultural resources other than those embedded in a particular display30 As Henrietta Lidchi remarks, exhibitions are 'discrete events which articulate objects, texts, visual representations, reconstructions and sounds to create an intricate and bounded representational system'.31 One of the most important tasks of this system is to render intelligible that which is probably complex and certainly - to some degree - unfamiliar. But this is achieved only by exhibitors undertaking the tasks of decoding the unfamiliar past and then encoding it again in the form of an exhibition. This necessarily involves a process of selection and creativity which 'allows certain meanings to surface'; all exhibitions employ an 'economy of meaning' which, by emphasizing some accounts and discouraging others, guides visitors towards a 'preferred reading'.32 How the ordering of an exhibition's components creates a meaningful representation is called the 'poetics' of exhibiting; this ordering is a central concern of the analysis in Chapters 2, 3 and 5. So too are the messages — the 'thematics', 'narratives' and 'myths' — generated by an exhibition's poetics.33 Those messages conveyed in an explicit and hence fairly unambiguous manner, for instance by way of textual labels, are an exhibition's denotations. But in some ways the more interesting messages are often those implicit in, implied by, or read into an exhibition — its connotations. It is at this level that myth primarily and most powerfully operates. These second-order meanings are far more ambiguous. A critic's reading of them must be treated with more caution, tested more widely against visitors' perceptions and comprehension. Yet the power of exhibitions to resonate with popular memory at an almost sub-conscious level is real enough, and the potential for this interaction to create and sustain myths is something that needs to be borne in mind for all that subsequent inquiry might prove it to be unrealized. All this means we advocate the adoption of a precautionary principle when looking at transport museums. While exhibitions do not necessarily function as instruments for the maintenance of inequalities of social power, one should be concerned to identify the many ways in which they run a strong risk of doing precisely this. Our interest in mythical connotations also involves looking at the politics of exhibiting; that is, identifying and locating transport museums' changing role in the production and reproduction of wider social 7

Making histories in transport museums

knowledge, including communal or group identities. Understanding a display's preferred readings is not just a matter of grasping the intentions of exhibitors, for their creative freedom is circumscribed by the available cultural resources. Such matters inevitably embrace questions of the institutional power of those who collect and exhibit; a good deal more attention than we can give in this book needs to be given to recovering a sense of the messy social dynamics of making transport displays.34 But again it is unhelpful to assume that museums are just reflections of dominant ideologies, or that they are nothing but agents of social control and reproduction. Rather they, or more accurately, certain individuals and groups within them, enjoy a degree of autonomy that may permit the development of novel classifications and kinds of display.35 Chapters 4 and 5 explore some of the ways that transport museums and heritage transport could exploit this comparative freedom to challenge mythical representations of the past. Transport museums: some preliminaries This book attempts an overview of the historical development and present standing of exhibitions about the past in transport museums around the world as well as offering some ideas about how displays might evolve. This is, to say the least, an ambitious goal, and a sense of pragmatism and, indeed, our own histories dictate certain restrictions on the enquiry's reach. While between us we have been fortunate enough over 30 years or so to visit many transport museums and heritage transport attractions in Australasia, Europe, North America, parts of Asia and the Indian subcontinent, we are most familiar with developments in Britain. This inevitably colours the analysis. So too does the fact that we share a chief interest in railways — including street and other tramways — and a weaker but still strong concern for other modes of public transport. In these fields we draw upon professional experience of museums and academic history, as well as participation in the associated voluntary sectors. But we also claim some knowledge of the academic and public histories of inland waterways, commercial and private motor transport, and, to a lesser degree, of coastal and ocean shipping, and commercial aviation. However, with one or two important exceptions in the field of aviation that bear particularly upon the wider argument, we do not treat displays of military transport. Neither, for reasons of space, do we deal with museums of single industries in which transport is an integral part of a larger production process (for example, mining), or with museums of communication (post and telecommunication), although many of our comments probably apply to these sectors as well. Within all of these museums we focus almost entirely on the exhibitions and displays that can 8

Museums, visitors and enthusiasts

be enjoyed throughout normal opening hours by ordinary visitors. Special events, and intermittent displays, such as guided tours and drama, have an increasingly important part to play in making histories of transport, but are not examined here. The fuller treatment of railways and tramways, and particularly those in Britain, does not make our conclusions hopelessly particular or parochial. In part, the reasons for saying this mirror the central thrust, if not the detail, of Jack Simmons's pioneering study of 1970, Transport Museums in Britain and Western Europe. Railways remain more completely displayed than any other branch of transport, and it is in Britain - along with the USA that the challenges, shortcomings and difficulties of these public exhibitions have been most comprehensively debated and tackled. However, the best practice in the display of other modes of transport no longer falls far, if at all, short of that of railways. While some of the difficulties Simmons identified facing air, maritime and road museums remain, advances in historical knowledge and the development of new technologies and philosophies of display have removed some and alleviated others. Thus while for instance maritime museums will always be severely restricted in the size of the vessels they can display under cover, the practices of mooring original or replica ships close by museum buildings, or even mounting exhibitions within them, are much more commonplace than in 1970. Nor, with the rapid development of computers as interpretive tools, particularly in the realm of virtual reality, will it be possible forever to claim that a working model of a ship - or for that matter an air- or space-craft bears no comparison with that of a real rail or road vehicle. And shortcomings in the historical understanding of, say, road transport are nowhere near as severe as they were when Simmons was writing, particularly in the USA; at their best, as with the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, motor museums achieve a breadth and authority of coverage on a par with that of leading railway museums.36 The second justification for focusing more on railed transport relates to the development of displays outside conventional museums. This is an aspect of public history that Simmons felt little need to study. For although well aware of the burgeoning growth of the steam railway preservation movement, he still believed that most locomotives would survive in museums.37 Events have simply proved him wrong; the rise of heritage transport in Britain, the USA and many other countries has meant that a very considerable number, probably a majority, of engines are kept outside the conventional museum. Most of these are intended for operation — a point discussed in more detail shortly - and it is with rail transport that the attempt to replicate the historical experience of travelling has been carried to the greatest extent. This is partly, as argued in Chapter 5, because rail transport is a complex system in which the various social and technical 9

Making histories in transport museums components are highly interrelated. In order to offer a journey, operators are more or less obliged to put together a whole 'heritage package! But while railed modes are exceptional in this respect, other forms of heritage transport have a similar potential. The spectacular growth in the preservation and display of historic transport in museums and elsewhere is largely a phenomenon of the period since the Second World War, and it is moreover one driven in no small measure - particularly in the USA, Britain and other anglophone countries - by private individuals and groups: enthusiasts. The continued upsurge in interest since 1970 marks perhaps the single most important difference between Simmons and ourselves when it comes to understanding transport museums' representation of the past. We therefore briefly sketch some of the issues that need to be considered when analysing enthusiasts' role in making public histories of transport. Enthusiasts, operating and the past Without enthusiasts, the transport collections in many countries would be far less rich, the possibilities for making public histories far more restricted, points detailed in Chapter 2. On the other hand, with enthusiasts in any field of endeavour, there is always a danger that a rather narrow range of ways of understanding the world will come to dominate. Although the popular stereotype of enthusiasts as lonely, socially inadequate misfits rarely matches the reality, through their societies and clubs they produce and exchange products - things, services or performances intended largely for consumption within the group, by similar enthusiasts in other collectivities, or by families and friends.38 What interests them does not necessarily match the wider public's concerns. Much more research needs to be done on what motivates and interests transport enthusiasts, but there is a good deal of anecdotal evidence to suggest that the operation of equipment and its corollary, movement, is and has long been a central and sometimes overriding concern. The specialist railway press, for example, reflects this almost every month with appeals for a particular locomotive or, more occasionally, an item of rolling stock, to be taken off static display and returned to use. Dating back to at least the 1960s, the colourful and emotional language often used shows the strength of feeling. Thus one correspondent - too young to recall steam in everyday use — described in the late 1990s how he always took his leave of an express passenger locomotive in the Birmingham Museum of Science and Industry with an unshakeable feeling of sadness that the engine is stuffed and mounted in this way, cold, dead, and with no prospect but periodically to be dragged ignominiously back and forth along a piece of track barely 10

Museums, visitors and enthusiasts longer than its own length . .. why, oh why, oh why has No. 46235 not been . .. returned to steam .. .? Is it to be reincarcerated in the new museum complex that is ... being built even now?39

In the most extreme cases this sort of perspective leads to the view that museums are little more than stores of vehicles to be returned to working order when others have worn out.40 Operating certainly has a part, indeed quite a large part, to play in helping people make sense of transport's past, a point to which we return in Chapter 5. But there is a danger that, by default, movement becomes the touchstone by which all museum displays are judged, a sense that - as Jack Simmons captured so well in the opening quote to this chapter - a conventional transport museum is an absurdity because transport is selfevidently about movement. Not all enthusiasts think like this of course: we exaggerate to make the point. But equally, a key argument of this book is that on the whole enthusiasts, along with many museum staff (who may, of course, be one and the same), do not think deeply enough about the wider historical context of transport. For as Simmons remarked, transport comprehends the movement of men and women and their goods by all possible means from place to place; and, properly considered, it ought to take account of the changing demands that affected it and the consequences it produced. It is a mere device for serving human needs, and unless those needs are kept in mind the study of it loses all touch with reality.41

Chapters 2 and 3 examine just how far transport museums reflect this more generous estimation of their purpose. Displaying transport in the past For all their importance, enthusiasts have never been the sole force driving the development of transport museums and collections, and the rest of this chapter sketches a history of the sector from the mid-nineteenth century until, very roughly, the 1960s to identify the range of social interests involved. More recent developments are treated in more detail in subsequent chapters. Business corporations and governments, at national, regional and local levels, have sometimes been as, or more, important than private groups and individuals, although the balance of influence among them all has varied considerably from country to country, and from one mode to another. Thus as we have already remarked, voluntary effort was particularly important in the USA and Britain, countries where governments have been comparatively reluctant to become involved in either the provision of transport or its commemoration; in both countries, preservation by transport businesses or certain of their key employees was also significant both before and after the Second World 11

Making histories in transport museums

War. Concomitantly, enthusiasts' influence was weaker in those nations where state involvement has been stronger - broadly speaking, in west European countries like Germany, Belgium and France, where in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the state became closely involved with the planning, construction, organization or operation of inland transport as part of the related processes of industrialization and nationbuilding. A similar case might perhaps be made for those east European countries, formerly part of the Soviet bloc, where after the Second World War the state tended to reserve to itself the direction of cultural affairs. In the former Soviet Union, for example, there was no privately owned car museum until the Riga Motor Museum opened in 1989.42 With their emergence from the late eighteenth century, public museums collected and displayed the 'prized objects' or 'trophies' of particular kinds of mastery - the gendered term is deliberate - over nature (natural history and science museums) or other peoples and their cultures (anthropological and ethnographic museums), all aspects of the process of nation-building. Some of the earliest permanent exhibitions of preindustrial transport fell into another category. The displays of royal carriages that adorned certain European cities since at least the middle of the nineteenth century symbolized either the continuing power of the monarchy over its own people, or its overthrow.43 But with the gathering pace of industrialization throughout that century, the USA and European nations increasingly adopted the machine as a measure of achievement and a symbol of identity. Early technical museums displayed a few railway locomotives and other transport items partly as markers of each nation's technical and cultural superiority over the others.44 The Musee des Arts et Metiers collected in this field as early as 1801, when it acquired Cugnot's steam wagon of 1771. In the 1880s the Science Museum (as it was to become in 1909) inherited a few railway locomotives of great significance — George and Robert Stephenson's Rocket, winner of the Rainhill Trials of 1829 which sealed the future of steam locomotion, was the most famous of these pioneering icons. It had gone in 1862 to London's Patent Museum, having been in private hands for some years. The Smithsonian Institution acquired its first engineering exhibit, a locomotive, in the mid-1880s, while the Deutsches Museum collected transport objects from its founding in the first decade of the twentieth century.45 On the whole, however, collecting and displaying transport was the responsibility of private interests, whether those of business corporations, engineers or groups of antiquarians and enthusiasts, well into the twentieth century. Accordingly we turn to their contributions, initially in the field of railways since this was the pre-eminent form of inland transport over any but the shortest of distances for much of the period up to the Second World War. 12

Museums, visitors and enthusiasts

The railway legacy: Britain Until nationalization in 1948 and with the brief exceptions of the two world wars railways in Britain were built and run by private companies, and it was these, sometimes cajoled by private individuals and societies of what would now be termed enthusiasts, that formed some of the earliest transport collections of any importance. Without their efforts almost nothing of significance would have been saved before the middle of the twentieth century. The British railway network was one of the densest in the world and it brought huge social and economic consequences for the country as a whole. Yet the companies initially did little to mark these achievements. 'Relics' were put aside only from around the middle of the century, roughly contemporaneously with a growing public interest in railway history, and even then only in penny numbers. These early efforts were directed at saving pioneering examples of mechanical engineering that had survived by chance - mostly locomotives, although a handful of carriages and wagons were also rescued. From the 1850s the companies displayed a few of these now worn-out locomotives in places associated with their working lives. For example, the Stephensons' Locomotion, built for the pioneering Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825, was put on a plinth at North Road Station, Darlington in 1857, while the Canterbury and Whitstable Railway's Invicta (1830) and the Furness Railway's Coppernob (1846) were similarly treated at a park in Canterbury in 1906 and Barrowin-Furness Station in 1900. Other engines were donated to museums for display. We have already noted the fate of Stephensons' Rocket; in 1865 it was joined at the Patent Museum by William Hedley's PuffingEilly of about 1814, an example of the cruder engineering of the railways serving the coal mines of north-east England, and by Timothy Hackworth's SansPareil, another of the Rainhill competitors.46 The exact reasons for these efforts are lost, although it seems likely that the companies were mindful of the publicity to be had from associating themselves with the pioneers of an industry that had contributed so much to Britons' sense of themselves. Corporate identity and patriotism made easy bedfellows; the publication from 1857 of Samuel Smiles's biographies of engineers confirmed a growing popular recognition of engineers, and particularly railway engineers, as heroes.47 Enlisting such acclaim to corporate advantage took on a strongly regional dimension in the case of the North Eastern Railway (NER), by far and away the most enthusiastic of the companies when it came to public displays. Most unusually for the period, the company enjoyed a virtual monopoly in the area it served and was thus keen to maintain good relations with customers lest its position be called into question. In 1875 the railway, along with the local authority and other bodies, 13

Making histories in transport museums

organized a Railway Jubilee to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway (which had been absorbed by the NER in 1863). The festivities included a temporary exhibition of 27 locomotives, including Locomotion.^ The national and international exhibitions of the latter half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries were another important place of display. Here the links between technical achievement, corporate identity and patriotism were even clearer. From the pioneering Great Exhibition of 1851 these exhibitions were partisan celebrations of national identity tempered but little by pious declarations of educational intent and universal humanity. Displays of machinery of all kinds played a crucial role in conveying messages of progress: past, present and future. Thus in the words of one historian, the displays 'would invariably be a celebration of the past as a preparation for a better future' in which 'the machine was consistently presented as the Messiah which would lead the human race to the Promised Land' — even if visitors and other contemporaries did not always take these intended meanings.49 The railways almost always contributed to such displays, usually exhibiting their most modern achievements. But historical relics had a part to play. Robert Stephenson, one of the organizers of the Great Exhibition, thought about displaying docket and Locomotion, although in the end nothing came of it. The Great Western Railway's Lord of the Isles, which had been at the Great Exhibition, was displayed 42 years later at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.50 The railways continued to exhibit in this way well into the next century. At the 1924—25 British Empire Exhibition, for instance, the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) juxtaposed Locomotion with the then ultra-modern Flying Scotsman in a small exhibition called 'The First and the Last', while the Metropolitan Railway, the LNER's partner serving the suburbs north of London, displayed two models of an early steam locomotive alongside a modern passenger coach.51 At the Festival of Britain in 1951, described by historian Sophie Forgan as 'one of the most impressive displays of science and technology the country had yet seen', historic vehicles and other artefacts contrasted with the principal exhibit on the transport display, a large steam freight locomotive built in Britain for export to India, and with other modern engines displayed outside nearby.52 By this time, however, the private companies had given way to the nationalized British Railways. Not until the mid-1920s were the railway companies persuaded of the advantages of a permanent museum. The pressure from antiquarians and enthusiasts was one factor, although when the idea had been floated by individuals in the 1890s the discouragement of senior railway officials was so great that nothing came of it. In the intervening years railway enthusiasts 14

Museums, visitors and enthusiasts

became more organized the Railway Club was founded in 1899, followed in 1909 by the more narrowly focused Stephenson Locomotive Society (SLS). Such groups could exert a more focused pressure for a national museum. In the 1920s the SLS took a pioneering practical step, buying the first locomotive to be privately preserved in Britain which it offered at first to the Science Museum.53 But the founding of the York Railway Museum in 1927-28 was the product of more than enthusiasts' desires. Corporate attitudes changed as the railways faced more trying economic and political circumstances between the world wars. As a response to severe financial difficulties engendered by the First World War the state had rationalized the industry, placing the overwhelming bulk of mileage in the hands of the 'Big Four' companies. This simplification of the industry's structure provided the opportunity to draw together material from across wider geographical regions; each company established modest collections of large and small objects, and written records. The motives for doing this were complex and various. Much was done — and undone, as some items were scrapped in the 1930s to make space in the workshops where they were stored — on the local initiative of senior mechanical engineers and other railway officials. Pride in one's profession thus informed preservation. So too did pride in doomed or recently dissolved companies. A modest collection of small items relating to the NER was gathered together in the early 1920s with official blessing, apparently in recognition of the company's imminent disappearance into the LNER. Similar motives seem to have underlain local initiatives from 1926 to build up a collection of old Midland Railway locomotives at that company's Derby workshops, by then recently absorbed, with much acrimony, into the London Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS).54 Nevertheless, as Dieter Hopkin persuasively argues, a case can be made for seeing managerial support for such activities as an attempt by the four grouped companies to forge corporate identities through association with their predecessors' achievements. This was most clearly the case with the LNER, financially the weakest of the Big Four. In 1925 it marked the centennial of the Stockton and Darlington by repeating on a grander scale the NER's celebrations of 1875 - a static exhibition of more than 100 locomotives and rolling stock was rounded off with a long cavalcade of stock, ancient and modern. Indeed the LNER pushed its pedigree back even further, a brief commissioned history linking the 'Tanfield Branch of the London and North Eastern Railway Company' with the Tanfield Waggonway - a primitive eighteenth-century horse-operated line.55 With these venerable origins established it was easy for the company's historian to draw upon a familiar nineteenth-century trope, celebrating the contributions yet to be made by the LNER (with perhaps just a little assistance from other railways): 15

Making histories in transport museums the Railway System has begun to bring about a rearrangement of the relations between man and man, which at its present stage of development we call Industrialism . . . As the snorts and hisses of the first locomotives soon subsided into the 'puff-puff beloved by every child, so will the awkward and ferocious gestures of infant industrialism become the ordered rhythm of the great forces moving the whole world's machinery56 In the 1930s the largest of the Big Four, the LMS, followed the LNER's lead by celebrating the centenary of two of its constituents, the Liverpool and Manchester (1830) and the London and Birmingham Railways (1838); the company's commissioned history of the former line was revealingly subtitled Trom Liverpool and Manchester to London, Midland and Scottish'. The railway also set up temporary exhibitions strongly featuring historic items, including locomotives and rolling stock. But in the wake of the economic depression of the early 1930s it was not minded to spend heavily and, apart from placing the locomotive Lion, an exceptional survival from the late 1830s that had been rescued from industrial service by a group of enthusiasts, on a plinth at Liverpool Lime Street Station, it did nothing of a permanent nature.57 The growing cooperation that generally characterized the railways' dealings with each other between the wars in the face of competition from other modes of transport benefited the York museum. Public relations were a powerful weapon in the political battle for favourable treatment by the state, and the museum had some contribution to make here. By 1939 its collection had developed modestly along national lines, although most of the large exhibits were locomotives from the LNER's constituents that had arrived for the opening in 1927—28 after the centennial celebrations. These were joined by the SLS's engine (a product of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway) after it had been rejected by the Science Museum on the grounds of lack of space, while the LMS, Great Western and Southern Railways later loaned large items. With its heavy emphasis on locomotives and rolling stock, the displays continued the nineteenth-century tradition of presenting mechanical engineering as a symbol of corporate and industrial identity grounded in technical progress.58 The British government became involved in a major way with the preservation and public display of historic transport when in 1948 it nationalized the railways along with the docks, inland waterways and certain road and urban transport operations, including London Transport. This had the effect of broadening the parameters for collecting. John Scholes, a professional curator of social history, was appointed by the newly formed British Transport Commission (ETC) to oversee its 'relics and records'. His report for the Commission, published in 1951,

16

Museums, visitors and enthusiasts

argued that although the need for economy prevented the immediate establishment of new institutions,'a well-placed, attractive, and properly managed British Transport Museum would be of material assistance in projecting the idea of an efficient national transport service'. It also acknowledged that in addition to the 'best-known'classes of objects, those 'associated with the engineering and operational aspects of train working', the ETC had a responsibility towards 'the wider social and cultural heritage' of the transport under its control.59 In the 1950s finances restricted Scholes to maintaining the York museum and mounting a series of temporary railway exhibitions in London, plus two that toured the rest of the country. Eventually a general museum of transport was opened in stages from 1961 in Clapham, south London. This closed in 1973, along with the York museum, the railway collections being transferred to the National Railway Museum, which opened in 1975 as part of the Science Museum. Local authorities also started to become more involved in establishing transport museums. The first had been in Hull, where a tiny fishing museum had opened as long ago as 1912, followed in 1938 by an equally modest railway museum. The initiatives of the 1960s were more impressive. In a joint initiative between the ETC and the local council, a railway museum dedicated to the former Great Western Railway opened in the Wiltshire town of Swindon during 1960. In 1964 Glasgow Corporation opened a transport museum featuring railway vehicles and other objects from the national collection with a Scottish connection alongside examples from the municipality's own strong collection of public transport vehicles. In Northern Ireland (which did not come under the auspices of the ETC) the Belfast Corporation gathered together a small collection of vehicles and other artefacts from 1954, opening them to the public in 1962.60 There was no single purpose behind these developments. The initiatives outside London were effectively realizations of an earlier wish by the ETC to establish regional outposts. But the Great Western Railway Museum was also to all intents and purposes a company museum, celebrating achievements of an organization that had legally disappeared in 1948 but lived on in the traditions and operating practices of the Western Region of British Railways. These were important for the region's sense of identity; the Swindon of the 1960s was still largely a creation of the GWR. In that decade, a period of extensive closures and rationalization on the railways, local pride was a perfectly adequate reason for the involvement of the local authority. Similar arguments can be made for the Glasgow initiative and for the original transport museum in Belfast, although as Jack Simmons has remarked, it was strange that no mention was made of the important local industries of shipbuilding and aircraft manufacture, or of air services.61 17

Making histories in transport museums

The railway legacy: the USA Although there were many differences - politically, economically, socially and technically - between the evolution of railways in Britain and the USA, the evolution of museums and collections was broadly similar in both countries. Certainly the earliest preservation in the USA was chiefly the product of business interests and private enthusiasts. The main difference has been the lack of a national railway museum sponsored by the federal government, a consequence of its lack of anything more than passing involvement with railroad construction and operation. As we have already noted, the Smithsonian did, however, collect the first locomotive to be intentionally preserved in the USA, the Camden and Amboy Railroad's John Bull of 1831. This was set aside privately in 1858, a little later than Rocket in Britain, having first been displayed at the New Jersey Agricultural Fair. It is likely that the engine survived because the family that had been instrumental in building the Camden and Amboy maintained a close connection with its successor companies.62 Other collecting in the nineteenth century was undertaken for many and varied motives, many of which remain unclear. From the 1880s senior engineers and antiquarians saved certain classes of old equipment that had happened to survive; between 1893 and 1917 some 20 or more examples of locomotives dating from before 1880 had been put to one side by railroads, with another ten bought by individuals.63 Feelings of professional pride and a growing sense of the significance of the railroads' contribution to American industrialization and westward expansion probably contributed to these developments. But there were other reasons. Some of the locomotives, as well as certain other kinds of hardware such as early strap rail, were saved as aids to the practical and indeed moral instruction of apprentices. In the mid-1880s for example, theYMCA created a small display of 'railway antiquities' in the New York Central's Grand Central Station with the hope of inspiring young mechanics to be better employees and Christians. While the YMCA's action might seem bizarre, and was perhaps a little unusual even at the time in terms of the items chosen for display, it was consonant with a belief in the reforming capacities of objects among many mid-Victorian Americans. Other collections had originated for more prosaic and mercenary reasons. In the 1860s for example one of the industry's representative bodies, the Eastern Railway Association, gathered a modest selection of models to demonstrate priority in claims over patent infringements.64 North American railroads were perhaps even more sensitive than their British counterparts to the advantages of associating displays of old equipment with celebrations of national identity. Progress, technical and national, was as common a theme at the American Expositions and 18

Museums, visitors and enthusiasts

World's Fairs as at their European counterparts. Several old locomotives were exhibited at the US centennial celebrations in 1876, and most of the subsequent international exhibitions included railroad displays. Just as in Britain, what would now be described as corporate heritage was used by a financially weak company as a palliative for its inability to invest in new equipment. The Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893-94) was completely dominated in railroad terms by the Baltimore and Ohio's (B&O) display. One of the oldest roads, under its dynamic public relations agent Joseph G. Pangborn the B&O orchestrated a huge exhibit of original relics, wooden full-size replicas, drawings and manuscripts. It was, according to the historian John H. White, 'a comprehensive assemblage showing a full chronological progression from the primitive beginnings of the railway to the latest improvements'.65 The B&O's motive was to reinvent and represent the burden of its worn-out equipment and out-ofdate operating practices as examples of 'the virtues of tradition and American history'. Such was the success of the venture that the display was largely remounted at the St Louis Fair in 1904.66 More successful railroads also saw advantages in such displays. One of the leading companies of the 1930s, the Pennsylvania (PRR), was a major driving force behind the railroads' display at the huge New York World's Fair of 1939—40, at the time the largest exhibition ever of such equipment. Modern locomotives from the Pennsylvania and its arch competitor, the New York Central, were shown alongside nineteenth-century equipment dating back to the 1830s, symbolizing the technical — and aesthetic — progress made generally by the railroads. All of this was linked with their past and future contribution to (American) civilization.67 The railroads also exhibited historic relics at the various shows they organized themselves. Although chiefly a trade display of modern equipment, the 1883 National Railway Appliance Exhibition was open to the public and displayed half a dozen old locomotives (including Locomotion, the only one from outside North America); by the 1920s similar trade shows were held annually in Chicago. More publicly oriented exhibitions became very popular at this time. In 1927 the B&O marked its centenary with 'The Fair of the Iron Horse', a huge fairground exhibition of relics and modern equipment as well as a daily pageant. (The following year the local transit company mounted a rather more modest display of old and new streetcars, unofficially dubbed 'The Fair of the Electric Pony!) Modelled partly on the LNER celebrations, the Fair was far bigger, attracting no fewer that 1.25 million visitors in 23 days. Other railroads and other nations were included in the exhibition, but with the mile-long succession of original and replica equipment in the pageant culminating in the B&O's most recent steam locomotive, few could be left in any doubt about the show's primary message.68 The last occasion on which the 19

Making histories in transport museums

railroads felt confident enough to mount this kind of celebratory exhibition was in 1948-49 when they staged the Chicago Railroad Fair, CA National Exhibition of Pageantry and Exhibits Depicting 100 Years of Railroad Progress'.69 Despite their enthusiasm for these temporary events, the railroads were reluctant to invest in corporate museums. John H. White argues that the railroads looked upon their small collections purely as publicity pieces, and it seems likely they judged the returns to be had from sending items in ones or twos to county fairs, anniversary celebrations, World's Fairs and so on were more favourable than those likely from a permanent museum. The economic depression after 1929 hit the railroads extremely hard, dampening enthusiasm for non-essential expenditure. In 1930 a proposal was made to use the opportunity of the forthcoming Chicago World's Fair to bring together a collection representing the history of all US railroad practice and thereafter to maintain the exhibition permanently. The idea received enthusiastic support from a leading trade journal, which argued for the indirect benefits to the railroads in terms of public relations.70 But nothing came of it. Running parallel with these corporate initiatives were those of railroad enthusiasts. Private collecting gathered pace after the First World War as enthusiasts increasingly organized in groups and the gathering pace of modernization threatened the survival of old equipment. By 1930 the Locomotive Historical Society had lodged a collection of old locomotive plans and pictures at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, although it is not clear why. By the late 1930s these groups and some individuals had built up considerable collections of locomotives and rolling stock, several eventually forming the bedrock of important museums. For example, the origins of the California State Railroad Museum, opened in 1981, lie with the artefacts gathered from 1937 by what became the Pacific Coast Chapter of the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society. Similarly, the Museum of Transportation in St Louis (always predominantly a display of railway artefacts) was founded as a private collection in 1944.71 From the late 1930s the imminent disappearance of steam traction, checked only briefly by the Second World War, spurred further collecting by railroads, enthusiasts and, later, public museums. However, corporate sponsorship increasingly gave way to that by state governments, not-forprofit trusts and private societies as the railroads struggled with financially debilitating competition from road and air transport. The B&O finally opened a museum in Baltimore in 1953, but it was closed as an economy measure in 1958, reopening six years later. The B&O's initiative was in any case exceptional. By the late 1950s the surviving railroads had jointly come to the view that public relations would best be served by 20

Museums, visitors and enthusiasts

emphasizing modern technologies and playing down links with the past. Their collections were handed over to publicly funded museums or charitable foundations. The B&O's lasted in corporate hands longer than most, the museum eventually being transferred to a charitable foundation in 1987-90. Most of the PRR collection, built up from 1938, was handed over in the 1970s to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania by the PRR's bankrupt successor in lieu of tax debts; it now forms the core of the state railroad museum.72 To this day the USA lacks a truly national railroad museum, although the Museum of Transportation in St Louis aspires to the title, and the other large regional facilities such as those in California and on the east coast stand comparison with any in the rest of the world in terms of the size and breadth of their collections and, if not always so consistently, standards of conservation and display. But without federal government involvement, no single museum has been able to overcome entirely the parochial interests of the railroad corporations and enthusiasts who founded their collections. The railway legacy: continental Europe We have already noted the importance of state museums on continental Europe. For instance in Germany - or, more accurately, Prussia - the state not only nationalized the railways at a very early stage, it took an early lead in the preservation and display of railway material in recognition of the system's contribution to the creation of a unified nation. The railways' great social prestige combined with the importance of their revenues to justify the establishment, in 1905, of the Verkehrs und Baumuseum (Museum of Transport and Construction) in Berlin's closed Hamburger Bahnhof. But the first railway museum in Germany was in Bavaria, opened in Nuremberg in 1899, developed by the state railway company from an exhibition at that city's international exhibition of 1882.73 In most of the rest of Europe official indifference was more commonplace until well into the twentieth century. Even in Italy, where the railways' contribution to unification in the nineteenth century was arguably as great as that in Germany, a national railway museum was only opened (in Naples) well after the Second World War, although before this there were much smaller displays at the main terminus in Rome and then at what is now the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Technica (National Museum of Science and Technology), Leonardo da Vinci, in Milan. Still as a generalization, the larger and more important railway museums in Europe owe their origins to the nationalized railway administrations of the twentieth century. An extreme example is Sweden, where in 1988 the ownership of the infrastructure (track and structures) 21

Making histories in transport museums

was separated from the operation of trains. There was already a wellestablished national railway museum, but the new publicly owned company responsible for infrastructure felt that its sphere of expertise was insufficiently emphasized: it founded a new museum.74 France serves as a more detailed example of the kind of evolving relationship between the public and private sectors that has often led to the founding of national railway museums. Here the state was less heavily involved than in Germany with railway development during the nineteenth century, and it did not become closely concerned with the preservation of material until after 1945. Construction and operation were largely left to private companies. These did little to save historic material until after the First World War; there was little interest in developing a museum until then, probably because the French railways were 'un veritable musee vivant'. At around this time the Est and Etat railways in particular put aside several locomotives dating back to the 1840s that had survived in service on secondary lines or as industrial boilers. None of this amounted to systematic collecting. As in Britain, much was left to local initiative at railway workshops and depots. Engineers' sense of professional pride inclined them to save items here and there in the face of indifference from management.75 Private enthusiasts had a part to play as well, although it was not until 1929 that a newly founded voluntary group, inspired by SLS activities in Britain and similar groups elsewhere in Europe, started to lobby for a systematic programme of preservation with a museum as an eventual goal. The twin threats of growing competition from other modes of transport and modernization of the railways — and particularly of the steam locomotive — were probably the chief reasons for this development. Some significant items were put aside - one engine went to the Paris exposition of 1937 as a sectioned exhibit - but much was lost before 1939. Although the French railways were nationalized in 1938 (as SNCF), the Second World War and then a lack of finance in the war-torn country prevented any significant moves towards a national museum for nearly three decades. After 1945 local initiatives by railway workers and engineering managers, encouraged in some cases by private societies, prevented the destruction of certain locomotives as wholesale modernization proceeded in the 1950s. Gradually a preservation policy focusing chiefly on locomotives evolved within the technical side of SNCF, but it was not until the mid-1960s that such moves were sanctioned at the highest level of the railway's management. Thereafter, the tide turned in favour of establishing a national museum. In 1969 the Ministry of Transport and SNCF agreed with the city of Mulhouse to place the railway's collection along with a small number of vehicles belonging to other organizations in a museum provided by the local and regional authorities. The latter saw 22

Museums, visitors and enthusiasts

the initiative as an important contribution to the economic regeneration of a region devasted by industrial decline. Opened on a temporary site in 1971, the Musee Fran^ais du Chemin de Per (French Railway Museum) moved to a permanent building in 1976.76 The legacy of other inland transport Railways are, of course, a mechanized industrial mode of transport. The preservation and display of older forms of everyday inland transport often have somewhat different origins, namely the impulse to save physical reminders of the rural folk customs threatened by industrialization. In general terms this impulse found its greatest success at first in Scandanavia in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, then spreading elsewhere in Europe and North America. The transport collections and later the museums that grew out of them were often the product of wealthy philanthropic individuals. Transport powered by animals has rarely been the domain of the large companies that judge a museum a worthwhile investment. If there has even been a museum dedicated to the commonest and most egalitarian form of transport, by foot, it has escaped our notice. But human- and animal-powered vehicles are quite widely exhibited. A striking example is the Carriage Museum at Stony Brook, New York, which with over 250 vehicles is perhaps the largest such collection in the USA; like the many similar museums across America and Europe its origins lie in a private collection. There is, however, a handful of museums with corporate roots. Exceptionally, the Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Company in Indiana employed 3000 workers by 1900, making it the largest wagon manufacturer in the world; the Studebaker National Museum contains many carriages and wagons dating from 1830 to 1920 among the total of more than 100 vehicles in the collection.77 Museums of navigable waterways are an interesting case. One of the oldest kinds of inland transport, it is also the least frequently represented. (There are 11 or so museums in Britain.) Some of the reasons for this are not hard to fathom. Although of great importance in the early stages of industrialization, canals and navigable rivers were rapidly eclipsed although not always destroyed - by railways in Britain, mainland Europe and the USA, except in those few areas where geographical and economic circumstances were favourable to ships or large barges. Corporate interest was virtually absent. In Britain, for example, the railway companies were often obliged to take over responsibility for the waterways they largely superseded, and it is scarcely surprising that they showed no enthusiasm for acknowledging a form of transport that was frequently a drain on their resources. But neither did canals and rivers seem to attract the attention of 23

Making histories in transport museums

folklorists until at least the inter-war period, perhaps partly because they were still associated with industrialization. Commemoration came mostly after the Second World War, largely, at least in Britain, through a combination of state resources and pressure from private individuals. The first museum in Europe to concentrate exclusively on inland waterways opened in 1963 at Stoke Bruerne in the English Midlands. It was run by the nationalized British Waterways Board, which had taken over from the ETC a virtually moribund system of narrow canals. The museum was part of a re-orientation of the network towards leisure use, a strategy which originated as much in the thinking of private individuals and historical societies as that of waterway officials. Similarly in the USA, museums were often the initiative of the National Parks Service, local authorities or voluntary societies.78 Museums of mechanized inland transport more commonly share the same mix of corporate and private origins often found with railway museums. Collections of urban public transport date from before the Second World War, reflecting the obsolescence of the electric vehicles at their original core — trams started to disappear in large numbers in Britain, some other European countries and the USA from the 1920s. In subsequent years privately and publicly owned operating bodies across the USA, Europe and Australasia put numerous obsolete vehicles and other equipment to one side. At least one transit company, that in Baltimore, started saving historic vehicles in the 1920s, although these were not permanently displayed until the 1970s, and then thanks only to a combination of private initiative and public funding. In Britain, for example, the London Transport Executive, the nationalized successor to the publicly owned London Passenger Transport Board of 1933, had by 1950 retained six early buses, plus a 1920s replica of a century-old vehicle; several trams were added when tramway services finished two years later. None however was displayed until the Museum of British Transport opened its galleries for large exhibits in 1963.79 Enthusiasts were even more active, although they did not exhibit publicly until the 1940s. The world's first streetcar museum, the Seashore Trolley Museum at Kennebunkport, Maine, started in 1939 when eight young men bought a working local interurban car. The collection moved onto its present site a year later and by the late 1990s this had become, de facto, the US national museum of urban mass transit, including some 30 trolley and motor buses as well as more than 200 railed vehicles. The success of the American enterprise inspired a similar voluntary initiative in Britain. The Tramway Museum Society, incorporated in 1955, dates back to the acquisition of a single tram in 1948. But public viewing of the growing collection at Crich was not encouraged until the early 1960s, when a limited tramcar operation started.80 24

Museums, visitors and enthusiasts

Private forms of mechanical road transport, particularly motor cars, were exhibited even earlier than public transport, reflecting perhaps their combination of high social esteem and very rapid rate of technological obsolescence. Temporary exhibitions of 'historic' motor cars (the oldest was barely a decade old) go back to at least 1909, when a display was mounted as part of the Imperial International Exhibition at London's White City; the following year one of the vehicles passed into the care of the Science Museum, its first. But the first significant museums dedicated more or less wholly to cars evince the variety of origins found with other transport museums. Both dating from 1927, the Musee National de la Voiture et du Tourisme (National Museum of Carriages and Tourism) at Compiegne, France, was run by the state, while the Swigart Museum in Pennsylvania was privately owned. Many important private collections elsewhere in the USA and Europe were started between the world wars, or even earlier, although many were not publicly displayed until the 1950s or later. Corporate collections were important to the founding of other early museums; Germany's Mercedes-Benz Museum opened in 1936 with a collection dating back to the late nineteenth century and which had first been exhibited in 1911. Other corporate collections, for example that of the Studebaker Company, are as old, although like their equivalents in private hands few were put on permanent public display until after the Second World War.81 These diverse origins are equally apparent in Britain, although it was only in the 1950s that car displays began to emerge on any scale (by 2000 there were some 100 publicly accessible collections). In Coventry and Birmingham they focused on local products, forming part of larger museums run by municipal authorities - but displaying many objects collected privately — that helped the postwar generation understand the role of their cities in twentieth-century industrialization. The Montagu Motor Museum at Beaulieu (later the National Motor Museum), originally a wholly private affair but opened to public viewing in 1952, was a little different. Here the original collection of five cars was displayed as a tribute to the owner's father, a motoring pioneer, and reflected more the first half-century of motoring in Britain, rising to its climax in the achievements of speed record breakers. It is quite notable that Beaulieu's ventures into public transport during the 1960s - trains and buses - were not sustained. Even in the 1990s commercial vehicles, taxis and buses played only a small part in the display. Corporate collecting has been important too in Britain; the Heritage Motor Centre, opened at Gaydon, Warwickshire in 1993, is based on the collections built up by the companies that became the Rover Group.82

25

Making histories in transport museums

The legacy of other modes: maritime and air The legacy of maritime museums, the earliest of which date from the nineteenth century, is mixed, partly reflecting the many and varied uses to which the sea has been put. Military and imperial ambitions have always been strongly represented, particularly in museums sponsored by the state. In the nineteenth century such ambitions relied heavily on the technologies of the sea, at first sailing ships and then, increasingly, the steamship which first emerged as a practical tool for long-distance traffic from the 1860s. These vessels (or models of them) featured prominently in many museums; indeed according to one scholar there is a clear correlation between an interest in preserving ships after major wars and their acquisition by museums. Many state maritime museums were, indeed still are, little more than warships presented as patriotic shrines intended to inculcate hero-worship.83 Other early museums reflected the history of the Western domination of other peoples through imperialism, almost always defining this in terms of narratives of civilization and progress. Such museums were often sponsored by the state. For example, until well after the Second World War Britain's role as an imperial maritime and naval power strongly informed displays at the National Maritime Museum. Although the museum did not open in anything like its present form until 1937, its origins lay in naval collections dating back to the early nineteenth century which had been assembled into a Naval Museum in Greenwich in 1873.84 It is likely that some early private collections and exhibitions were also informed by the cultural assumptions of imperialism. For example, what is now known as the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts opened a Marine Room in 1905. The museum's origins date back to the East India Marine Society of 1799; among other aims, the society had the objective of displaying 'natural and artificial curiosities, particularly such as are to be found beyond the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn'.85 Such anthropological collections were widely displayed throughout the nineteenth century as a means of inculcating in visitors a sense of moral superiority towards subjugated peoples, and it is plausible that the inclusion of maritime artefacts within the Museum's displays was informed by this kind of thinking. At least one very early maritime museum was directed more to the exhibition of state power in a domestic context. The core collection of the modern Portuguese National Maritime Museum was founded by the monarch as a naval academy and maritime museum in 1863, featuring 'the archives of glorious relics' - chiefly ceremonial royal barges. Despite Portugal's long history as a maritime power this early collection seems to have had little to do directly with overseas trade or colonies.86 In sharp contrast to this varied legacy of the display of state power 26

Museums, visitors and enthusiasts

stands a tradition of preserving and commemorating pre-industrial folk customs associated with fishing and similar maritime activities. This trend began in the late nineteenth century, first in Scandinavia before spreading elsewhere in Europe and North America. Small boats were often at the core of such displays. An early example of this kind of museum is the New Bedford Whaling Museum, opened in Massachusetts in 1903. Mystic Seaport, arguably the premier maritime museum in North America, was founded in 1929 but did not take off as a visitor attraction until the whaler Charles W. Morgan arrived in 1941. In Europe, Hull's tiny Museum of Fisheries and Shipping, opened in 1912, included displays on whaling (a local industry until 1868) as well as ship models, marine paintings and navigation instruments. Collections at Elsinore (merchant shipping, shipbuilding and maritime folklore), Gothenburg and Stockholm followed over the next two years.87 Early air transport was also closely associated with military and imperial ambitions which in turn became entangled with pioneering commercial operations, as graphically illustrated by Britain's premier airline between the world wars, Imperial Airways. The world's first commercial flight took place in 1919, but the military-imperial dimension to the development of civilian air transport has always strongly marked the evolution of museums in this sector.88 Dedicated aviation museums largely date from after 1945, although the Musee de 1'Air in Paris was the first institution to focus entirely on the permanent exhibition of aircraft. Its collection goes back to 1919 and was opened to the public in 1921; these early displays were wholly of a military nature.89 The Smithsonian had opened its first permanent display a year earlier, located in a small, 'temporary' structure which could house only a few of the aircraft from a collection dating back to the dawn of heavierthan-air flight, other examples being displayed elsewhere in the museum. The world's first military aircraft, the US Army's Wright A, had gone to the Smithsonian in 1911, but it was not until 1923 that the US Army set up the country's first museum of military aviation, at McCook Field, Dayton, Ohio. This however was for the purpose of study by military personnel, a public exhibition not opening until 1935, at nearby Wright Field. The Smithsonian's National Air Museum (later the National Air and Space Museum) was not authorized until 1946, the product of an outburst of patriotic fervour after the war; it was another 30 years before a building worthy of the collection was opened in Washington DC. Other major national collections have similarly venerable and militaristic origins. Canada's National Aviation Museum, for instance, includes material from provincial collections dating back to 1919.90 The corporate museum of civilian aircraft by contrast is very rare, although Boeing has one in Seattle. Like industrial-scale shipbuilders, 27

Making histories in transport museums

aircraft manufacturers do not sell directly to the public (light planes aside), while the purchasers - that is, airlines - are unlikely to be influenced by such gestures. On the other hand, the Zeppelin Museum, opened in Friedrichshafen, Germany in the mid-1990s, was sponsored heavily by the Zeppelin company; perhaps it thought that the airship's niche market might grow if the public was made aware of the technology's environmental and other advantages over aeroplanes.91 Commercial airlines' lack of interest in museums is probably explained by the dispersed nature of their markets: always the province of the long-distance traveller, for many years after the Second World War airlines competed chiefly in international markets. Although the commercially viable length of haul has fallen to just a couple of hundred miles, airlines seem no more convinced than companies in other modern transport sectors that money spent on a museum is a worthwhile investment. A few airports Frankfurt is one example, Baltimore another — do have small displays as a diversion for waiting passengers.92 Almost all the institutions discussed so far were either specialist divisions of general museums of industry or technology, or they were dedicated to particular modes of transport. Broadly speaking, as we have argued, the very earliest displays were those in which the state had a major hand, and these tended to form part of wider narratives about industrialization and nation-building. By contrast temporary exhibitions and permanent museums established by business corporations focused on their own narrower concerns, although they often drew on the same narratives as national museums. On the whole, enthusiasts and their societies have reflected the interests of the industries they so admire, although an important exception must be made for collections of preindustrial modes of transport. As we have discussed in some detail with regard to railways, the picture became more complex, particularly after the Second World War, as the collections of many corporations and individuals passed into the care of public authorities or independent charitable trusts. As part of this trend, several museums, mostly in Europe, embraced several - but scarcely ever all - modes of transport. Those at Dresden (founded 1952), Lucerne (1959), Berlin (1983) may be added to the museums in Britain and Northern Ireland already mentioned. By the early 1980s the South African Transport Services Museum, for example, featured the state-owned railways, harbours, road transport and aviation services. Several of these general transport museums were founded by the cultural ministries of communist regimes, others by private trusts, either working on their own or in partnership with local authorities.93

28

Museums, visitors and enthusiasts

The present and future past in transport museums The rest of this book in concerned primarily with two tasks. Chapters 2 and 3 analyse the kinds of narratives embodied in transport displays since roughly 1945. Almost all transport museums are in the business of heritage in David Lowenthal's sense, projecting certain deep-rooted myths about transport and its role in shaping the societies in which we live. The English nationalist historian G. M. Trevelyan once opined that 'Railways were England's gift to the world', and, for better or worse, transport exhibitions often consist of little more than trophies and icons symbolizing such particularist sentiments.94 Sometimes indeed they are too inward-looking even to explore these. However, as we have already remarked, it is impossible to ignore people's use of museums and myths to bolster their sense of collective identity and rootedness. The public history of transport can, and indeed should, develop more in the direction of self-critical narratives that encourage reflection upon their own premises. In many transport museums there is little or no mission consciously to explain, so that visitors get no help in reflecting upon the beliefs and attitudes they bring with them. When interpretation is made available, narratives about the past are usually presented as absolute truths, discouraging visitors from reflecting on the assumptions built into displays. Much better, we contend, if instead visitors were helped to acquire the skills and knowledge to come to their own informed conclusions about the past, helping them to develop as democratic citizens. Chapter 4 explores some of the ways in which this might be possible in conventional transport museums, while Chapter 5 deals with the realm of heritage transport. Notes 1. A 1990s guide listed 187, including those of a military nature; 113 maritime museums were separately identified, although there was some overlap between the two categories: Museums and Galleries 1997^ Hobsons, London, n.d. (ca. 1996), 130-41. A 1988 survey identified 278 museums (out of a total of over 2000) relating 'primarily' to transport; J. D. Storer,'Conservation of industrial collections', Transport Museums, 15/16 (1988/89), 57-65, at 59. 2. Kenneth Hudson and Ann Nicholls, The Directory of Museums and Living Displays, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 3rd edn, 1985, viii, 814; J. Poutre, 'Naval and maritime museums list', Part 1, 'United States of America', and Part 2, 'International (except USA), www.bb62museum.org/usnavmus.html and www.bb62museum.org/wrldnmus.html, 1999; M. H. Evans and Janet West, 'Guide to naval and maritime museums and collections in Britain and Ireland', www.cus.cam.ac.uk/-mhelOOO/, 1999; Bob Ogden, Aircraft museums and collections of the world' www.reading.ac.uk/AcaDepts/sn/wsnl/dept/av/, 29

Making histories in transport museums

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

1995; Allan Lee, American Transportation: Its History and Museums, Hildesigns Press, Charlottesville VA, 1993, 7; 'Trains 2000 Guide to Recreational Railroading', supplement toTrams, May 2000; Robert D. Hicks,'The ideology of maritime museums, with particular reference to the interpretation of early modern navigation', unpublished PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 2000, 10; Glenn Godinier, 'Mystic Seaport' paper delivered at Maritime Heritage Confererence: Carried Along by the Currents?, University of Portsmouth, April 1999; Pasquale Angius and Aldo Farneti, Guide to Railway and Tramway Museums in Europe, Odos, Milan, 1990, 4, 255-9; Robert F. McKillop, Guide to Australian Heritage Railways and Museums, Australian Railway Historical Society, Redfern, NSW, 6th edn, 1997; June Taboroff and John Tillman, 'The Bank and cultural heritage: transport sector perspectives', internal discussion document for the World Bank, July 1999, annex 1. 'Recreational Railroading'; McKillop, Australian Heritage. Alex Roland, 'Celebration or education? The goals of the US National Air and Space Museum', in Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus (ed.), Industrial Society and Its Museums: 1890-1990: Social Aspirations and Cultural Politics, Harwood Academic, Reading, 1993, 77-89, at 87. Karlheinz Bockle, 'The economic side of the Auto & Technik Museum', Transport Museums 22 (1995), 71-3, at 71; Godinier, 'Mystic Seaport'; annual reports of the National Railway Museum and the National Tramway Museum; Visits to Tourist Attractions 1996, British Tourist Authority/English Tourist Board Research Services, London, 1997; Introduction to The Museum of Transportation: Highlights of the Collection, Transportation Museum Association, St Louis, 1997; Brian D. Barber, Association of Railway Preservation Societies Ltd and Association of Independent Railways: 1995 Statistical Survey Report, Publicity Projects/British Steam Railways, n.p., 1996, 4, 7; Linn Moedinger, 'The Strasburg Rail Road, Lanchester County, Pennsylvania', in Rob Shorland-Ball (ed.), Common Roots - Separate Branches: Railway History and Preservation, Science Museum/National Railway Museum, York, 1994,176-83 at 178. Barber, 1995 Statistical Survey, 32-5; William G. Wood, 'How and why are pasts represented in museums, and with what implications for their educational role?', unpublished PhD thesis, University of East Anglia, 1994, 102-28, at 124. Nick Merriman, Beyond the Glass Case: The Past, the Heritage and the Public in Britain, Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1991, 22-41, esp. 37-8; Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig (eds), History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1989; Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg, Duke University Press, Durham, 1997; Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American 'Life, Columbia University Press, New York, 1998, esp. 137. 30

Museums, visitors and enthusiasts 8. Michael Kammen, In the Past Lane: Historical Perspectives on American Culture, Oxford University Press, New York, 1997, xii; Michael Bommes and Patrick Wright, '"Charms of residence": the public and the past', in Richard Johnson, Gregor McLennan, Bill Schwarz and David Sutton (eds), Making Histories: Studies in history-Writing and Politics, Hutchinson, London, 1982, 253— 301; Lois H. Silverman,'Personalizing the past: a review of literature with implications for historical interpretation', journal of Interpretation Research, 2/1 (1997), 1-12; Rosenzweig and Thelen, Presence of the Past, 6-8. 9. Silverman, 'Personalizing the past', 3—4. 10. John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking, The Museum Experience, Walesback, Washington DC, 1992,123. 11. Gaynor Kavanagh, Dream Spaces: Memory and the Museum, Leicester University Press, London, 2000, 1-8, 148-75; Editors' introductions to Marius Kwint, Chistopher Breward and Jeremy Aynsley (eds), Material Memories: Design and Evocation, Berg, Oxford, 1999, 1—16, and to Susannah Radstone, Memory and Methodology, Berg, Oxford, 2000, 1-22; John Urry, 'How societies remember the past' in Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe (eds), Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World, Blackwell/Sociological Review, Oxford, 1996, 45-65. 12. Ivan Karp,'Culture and representation' in Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (eds), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and the Politics of Museum Display, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC, 1991, 11-24, at 15. 13. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985, and The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, Viking, London, 1997; Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture, Verso, London, 1994; David Brett, The Construction of Heritage, Cork University Press, Cork, 1996; Kevin Walsh, The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Post-Modern World, Routledge, London, 1992; Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, Routledge, London, 1995. 14. Lowenthal, Heritage Crusade, 67, 128. 15. Patrick Wright, On Eiving in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain, Verso, London, 1985, 188. 16. See also George E. Hein, Learning in the Museum, Routledge, London, 1998, 100—54; Silverman, 'Personalizing the past', 1—12. 17. Lowenthal, Heritage Crusade, 102. 18. See, for example, Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline, Methuen, London, 1987, 83-105, 131-46; Walsh, Representation of the Past, 130-2. 19. Lowenthal, Heritage Crusade, xi. See also for instance, Brett, Construction of Heritage, 1—37. 20. Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 147 (emphasis in original). See also Heiner Treinen,'What does the visitor want from a museum? mass-media aspects

31

Making histories in transport museums

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

of muscology', in Sandra Bicknell and Graham Farmelo (eds), Museum Visitor Studies in the 90s, Science Museum, London, 1993, 86-93, esp. 91. Karp, 'Culture and representation', 22. Steven Lubar, 'Exhibiting memories', in Amy Henderson and Adrienne L. Kaeppler (eds), Exhibiting Dilemmas: Issues of Representation at the Smithsonian, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC, 1997, 15-27; Editors' introduction to Macdonald and Fyfe (eds), Theorizing Museums, 1-18, esp. 912; Editors' introduction to Karp and Lavine (eds), Exhibiting Cultures, 1-9, at 3-5; Susan M. Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the EuropeanTradition, Routledge, London, 1995, 290-307. An excellent summary of the literature is given in Hein, Learning in the Museum. See also Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and Their Visitors, Routledge, London, 1994, esp. 3S-53,140-70. Hein, Learning in the Museum, esp. 135-54; Silverman,'Personalizing the past', 1-12; Falk and Dierking, Museum Experience, 97-125, 131-2; Helen Edmondson, 'On the right track? visitors' perceptions of the National Railway Museum', unpublished MA dissertation, University of Sheffield, 1996, 72-127, quote at 125. Lowenthal, Past Is a Foreign Country, 249. Nick Merriman, 'Understanding heritage', journal of Material Culture, 1, (1996), 377-86, at 384. For an introduction to some of the theoretical and methodological issues that might be involved, see Gordon Fyfe and Max Ross, 'Decoding the visitor's gaze: rethinking museum visiting', in Macdonald and Fyfe (eds), Theorizing Museums, 127—50; Falk and Dierking, Museum Experience. Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1999; John R. Davis, The Great Exhibition, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 1999. Oral history might well tell something about the long-term effects of museum visiting; on the remembrance of visits, see Falk and Dierking, Museum Experience, 97-125. Falk and Dierking, Museum Experience, 131; Peter Vergo,'The reticent object', in Peter Vergo (ed.), The New Museolog)!, Reaktion Books, London, 1989,41-59, esp. 45-6. Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst, Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination, Sage, London, 1998, esp. 3-37. Henrietta Lidchi,'The poetics and politics of exhibiting other cultures', in Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, Sage, London, 151-208, at 168. Lidchi,'Poetics', 165^7,170. Lidchi, 'Poetics', 153, 168; Roger Silverstone, 'Heritage as media: some implications for research', in David L. Uzzell (ed.), Heritage Interpretation: The Visitor Experience, Belhaven Press, London, 1989,138-48, at 143-5. Lidchi, 'Poetics', 153, 184-99; Introduction to Karp and Lavine (eds), 32

Museums, visitors and enthusiasts

35.

36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

Exhibiting Cultures, 1-9; Introduction to Macdonald and Ffye (eds), Theorizing Museums, 4-5; Abercrombie and Longhurst, Audiences, 33-4. Introduction to Karp and Lavine (eds), Exhibiting Cultures, 1-9; Lidchi, 'Poetics', 197-9; Gordon Fyfe, 'A Trojan Horse at the Tate: theorizing the museum as agency and structure', in Macdonald and Fyfe (eds), Theorizing Museums, 203—28. Jack Simmons, Transport Museums in Britain and Western Europe, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1970, 19-21; Wolf Dieter Hoheisel, 'The open air museum: a concept for the future?, Transport Museum, 13/14 (1986/87), 8-13; Stein E. Johansen, 'The future of museums in the era of virtual reality: extension, transformation, or collapse?', Transport Museums, 22 (1995), 3749. Simmons, Transport Museums, 275. Abercrombie and Longhurst, Audiences, 121-57, esp. 131—4; Robert A. Stebbins, Amateurs, Professionals and Serious Leisure, McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal, 1992, 38-67; Kevin Moore, Museums and Popular Culture, Leicester University Press, London, 1997, 96-9. Letter in Steam Railway, 217, Spring (1998), 53. E.g. Steam Railway, 221, August (1998), 42. Simmons, Transport Museums, 18. Edwin Liepins, A motor museum and new developments in the Baltic', Transport Museums, 20 (1993), 77-8, at 77. On Hungary under the communist regime, see Bella Czere, 'Presentation of transport in museums', Transport Museums, 2 (1975) 31-56, at 40-7; and on Poland, Jerzy Jasiuk, 'Transport museums and collections in Poland', Transport Museums, 2 (1975) 48-56, esp. 52. Simmons, Transport Museums, 22; Teresa Fabijanska-Zurawska, Architecture and exhibitions of some European carriage museums', Transport Museums, 17 (1990), 106-12; Stuart Piggott, Wagon, Chariot and Carnage: Symbol and Status in the History of Transport, Thames and Hudson, London, 1992, 152-63. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Man: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1989; Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women and Modern Machines in America, 1870^1945, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 1999, esp. 10 50,182-90. E. A. Forward, Handbook of the Collections Illustrating Land Transport, vol. 3, pt. 2, Railway Locomotives and Rolling Stock: Descriptive Catalogue, HMSO, London, 1931, 3; Simmons, Transport Museums, 22-4,189-97, 232-3; Kenneth Hudson, Museums of Influence, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, 96-103; John H. White, 'The railway museum: past, present, and future', Technology and Culture, 14 (1973), 599-613, at 599. Philip Atkins, 'The early British rolling stock inheritance', and Dieter Hopkin, A commentary on restoration, conservation and the National

33

Making histories in transport museums

47. 48.

49.

50.

51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

Railway Museum collection' both in Shorland-Ball (ed.), Common Roots, 8894, 215-22; R. G. W. Anderson,' "What is technology?" education through museums in the mid-nineteenth century', British Journal for the History of Science, 25 (1992), 169-84, at 181; Eugene S. Ferguson, 'Technical museums and international exhibitions', Technology and Culture, 6 (1965), 30-46, at 39. Adrian Jarvis, Samuel Smiles and the Construction of Victorian Values, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 1997, esp. 69-91. Dieter Hopkin, 'Railway preservation: railways, museums and enthusiasts', unpublished MA dissertation, University of Leicester, 1987, 3-5; J. S. Jeans, jubilee Memorial of the Railway System: A History of the Stockton and Darlington Railway and a Record of its Results, Frank Graham, Newcastle upon Tyne, 3rd edn, 1974 (originally 1875), 304-15. Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World's Fairs, 1851-1939, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1988, passim, quote at 23-4; Auerbach, Great Exhibition, 91189. Davis, Great Exhibition, 183-203; Auerbach, Great Exhibition, 106. Helen Ashby, 'The great international exhibitions: railway prizewinners and the National Railway Collection', in Neil Cossons, Allan Patmore and Rob Shorland-Ball (eds), Perspectives on Railway History and Interpretation, National Railway Museum, York, 1992, 100-9; Jeffrey Wells, 'The Great Exhibition and the railways', part one, backtrack, 12 (1998), 676—9; 'Railways and the exhibitions of 1851 and 1951', Railway Magazine, 97 (May 1951), 299-302. 'Railway exhibits at the British Empire Exhibition', Railway Magazine, 54 (June 1924), 468-74, quote at 470. Sophie Forgan, 'Festivals of science and the two cultures: science, design and display in the Festival of Britain, 1951', British journal for the History of Science, 31 (1998), 217-40, quote at 218.'Railways and the exhibitions', 301-2. Simmons, Transport Museums, 23-4; Hopkin, 'Railway preservation', 47, 8899. Dieter Hopkin, 'Railway preservation in the 1920s and 1930s', in Cossons, Patmore and Shorland-Ball (eds), Perspectives, 88-99. '1825-1925: the Railway Centenary Celebrations at Darlington, July 1-3', Railway Magazine, 57 (1925), 101-35. Randall Davies, The Railway Centenary: A Retrospective, London & North Eastern Railway, London, n.d. \ca. 1925], 1. Davies, Railway Centenary, 49. C. F. Dendy Marshall, One Hundred Years of Railways: From Eiverpool and Manchester to London Midland and Scottish, London Midland & Scottish Railway, London, 1930; 'LMS: Centenary of opening of first main-line railway' supplement to Railway Gazette, 16 September 1938; 'The London & 34

Museums, visitors and enthusiasts Birmingham Railway - IF, Railway Magazine, 83 (1938), 338-41; Hopkin, 'Railway preservation', 90-6; The Preservation of Relics and Records: Report to the British Transport Commission, British Transport Commission, London, 1951, 10-11. 58. Simmons, Transport Museums, 23-4; Hopkin, 'Railway preservation7, 88-99; BTC, Relics and Records, 10-11. 59. BTC, Relics and Records, 9, 13.

60. Simmons, Transport Museums, 50-1, 101, 115-21, 169-70, 180-5; W. A. McCutcheon, 'Industrial archaeology and technological conservation in Northern Ireland', Technology and Culture, 10 (1969), 412-21, at 420; Bryan Morgan, Transport Preserved, British Railway Board, London, 1963, 4-13, 30-9. 61. BTC, Relics and Records, 13. Tim Bryan, 'GW Museum moves into a hands-on era', Steam Railway, 234 (August 1999), 54-8; L. T. C. Rolt, The Great Western Railway Museum, GWR Museum, Swindon, 2nd edn, 1968, 5—10; Simmons, Transport Museums, 180. 62. John H. White, The John Bull: 150 Years a Locomotive, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC, 1981, and 'Railway museum', 599. 63. Walter P. Gray III, 'The American experience: railway preservation in the US', in Shorland-Ball (ed.), Common Roots, 184-6. 64. White, 'Railway museum', 600; Michael J. Ettema, 'History museums and the culture of materialism', in Jo Blatti (ed.), Past Meets Present: Essajs about Historic Interpretation and Public Audiences, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC, 1987, 62-85, at 64-74. 65. John H. White, 'Baltimore and Ohio Transportation Museum', Technology and Culture, 11 (1970) 70-84, quote at 76. 66. The B&O Railroad Museum: A Visitors Guide, B&O RR Museum, Baltimore, 1994, 78-82; White, 'Railway museum', 601-2; John P. Hankey, 'B&O Railroad Museum, Baltimore, Maryland', in Shorland-Ball (ed.), Common Roots, 195-8, at 195. 67. Gray, 'The American experience', 185; White, 'Railway museum', 601-2; Ferguson, 'Technical museums', 30-46; Robert L. Emerson, 'The Pennsylvania Railroad historical collection 1939-1989', reprinted from Milepost, 1 (1989), 1-12, at 3-4; David Gelernter, 1939:The Lost World of the Fair, Avon, New York, 1995, 153-61,173-4. 68. B&O RR Museum, Visitor's Guide, 60-4; White, 'B&O', 79-81; Andrew S. Blumberg, A Guide to the Baltimore Streetcar Museum, Baltimore Streetcar Museum, Baltimore, 1999,1. 69. Curtis L. Katz, 'The Last Great Railroad Show', Trains, 58/8 (1998), 58-67, unattributed quote at 58. 70. Railway Age, 88 (1930), 753; Railway Age, 88 (1930), 392-3. 71. Railway Age, 88 (1930), 753; Gray, American experience', 184-6; White, 'Railway museum', 599-613; John H. White, 'The California State Railroad 35

Making histories in transport museums Museum: a Louvre for locomotives', Technology and Culture, 24 (1983), 644-54; Dan Marshall, 'Treasures of St Louis', Trains, 56/9 (1996), 42-9; Museum of Transportation, 19—27. 72. B&O RR Museum, Visitor's Guide, 79-80; White, 'Railway museum', 603-4; Courtney B. Wilson, Mt. Clare: The birthplace of American Railroading, B&O RR Museum, Baltimore, 1999, 26-9; Emerson, 'Pennsylvania collection', 4-9. 73. Simmons, Transport Museums, 245-6; Wolfard Weber, 'The political history of museums of technology in Germany since the nineteenth century', in Schroeder-Gudehus (ed.), Industrial Society, 13-25; Alfred Gottwaldt, 'The railway buildings of Berlin and the Museum fur Verkehr und Technik', in Shorland-Ball (ed.), Common Roots, 37-42; James M. Brophy, Capitalism, Politics and Railroads in Prussia 1830-1870, Ohio State University Press, Columbus OH, 1998; Stefan Zeilinger and Michael Hascher, 'Museums of technology in Germany', Technology and Culture, 41 (2000), 525-9. 74. Albert Schram, Railways and the formation of the Italian State in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997; Simmons, Transport Museums, 229—31; Lars Olav Karlsson, 'The new Banmuseet', Transport Museums, 24 (1998), 101-6. 75. Francois Caron, Histoire des chemins defer en Trance, 1740-1883, Fayard, n.p., 1997; Bernard Porcher, 'Vers un musee fran^ais du chemin de fer: des amis motives', Chemins de Fer, 438 (August 1996), 4-9. 76. Porcher, 'Musee frangais', 4-9; Jean Renaud, Musee Fran$ais du Chemin de Fer, Mulhouse, Musee Frangais du Chemin de Fer, Mulhouse, 1993; Charles E. Lee, 'The Buddicom locomotive at South Bank', Railway Magazine, 97 (July 1951), 487-9. 77. Gaynor Kavanagh, History Curatorship, Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1990, 14-31; Lee, American Transportation, 48-53, 96-111, 162-83; FabijanskaZurawska, 'European carriage museums', 106-12. 78. 'Other UK canal museums', www.canalmuseum.org.uk/canmusuk.htm, 2000; Simmons, Transport Museums, 115-21; David Bolton, Race Against Time: How Britain's Waterways Were Saved, Mandarin, London, 1991, 39; Lee, American Transportation, 55—77. 79. Blumberg, Baltimore Streetcar Museum, 1-4; BTC, Relics and Records, 12, 39; Simmons, Transport Museums, 60—7. 80. Robert E. Kelly, A Guide to the Seashore Trolley Museum, Seashore Trolley Museum, Kennebunkport ME, 1997, 3; Andrew D. Young, Veteran and Vintage Transit, Archway Publishing, St Louis MO, 1997, 43-8; Ian Yearsley, Tramway Adventure: A Celebration of Tramcar Preservation, 1948-1998, Tramway Museum Society, Crich, 1998, 2-12. 81. A. Lee, AmericanTransportation, 162-83; T. R. Nicholson, AutomobileTreasures: An Introduction to the Open Motor-Car Collections of Britain and Europe, Ian Allan, London, n.d. ^a. 1963), 16-120; Jean-Denys Devauges,'Le Musee de laVoiture 36

Museums, visitors and enthusiasts

82.

83. 84.

85. 86.

87.

88.

89. 90.

91. 92. 93.

et du Tourisme de Compiegne, 1927-1994: histoire et perspectives', Transport Museums, 20 (1993), 89-93; Neil Cossons, 'Messages from motor museums', in John S. Moore (ed.), World Forum of Motor Museums: Papers of the Fourth Forum, NE Consultancy, Gaydon, 1996, 7-13; Max-Gerrit von Pein, 'The new DaimlerBenz Museum: an invention sets the world in motion', Transport Museums, 13/14 (1986/87), 14-18; Simmons, Transport Museums, 34-7. 'Classic motor museums listing', www.classicmotor.co.uk/museums/ museums.htm, 2000; Nicholson, Automobile, 20—2, 25; Graham Carter, The National Motor Museum: A Pictorial Guide to Motoring History, NMM, Beaulieu, 1995; Heritage Motor Centre Catalogue, Gaydon, British Motor Industry Heritage Trust, 1997, 3-5. Hicks, 'Ideology of maritime museums', 17-37. Hicks, 'Ideology of maritime museums', 17; Bennett, 'Birth of the museum', 149—50, 177—208; Simmons, Transport Museums, 23, 77. Simmons noted, however, that even in the late 1960s the maritime history of the East India Company was poorly treated. Lee, AmericanTransportation, 101—2. Quoted in Manuel Villarinho/Museu de Marinha: the Portuguese National Maritime Museum', Transport Museums, 9 (1982), 19-35, at 20; Alfredo Ramos Rocha, 'Exhibition of Portuguese traditional boats in a new environment', Transport Museums, 15/16 (1988/89), 99-104, at 99. Hicks, 'Ideology of maritime museums', 32; Godinier, 'Mystic Seaport'; Simmons, Transport Museums, 23, 144—5; Lee, American Transportation, 96—111; Edward Paget-Tomlinson, 'A maritime museum for Hull', Transport Museums, 3 (1976), 9-17; Ole Crumlin-Pedersen,'The Viking Museum of Roskilde: a museum of nautical archaeology in Denmark', Transport Museums, 2 (1975), 84-104. Harvey H. Lippincott, 'The development of aviation museums in the United States of America', Transport Museums, 3 (1976), 18-37; Peter Lyth,'The history of commercial air transport: a progress report, 1953—93', journal of Transport History, 14 (1993), 166-80, at 166. 'Musee de 1'air at de 1'espace', descriptive pack, ca. 1998, 14. Lee, AmericanTransportation, 202 25; Roland,'Celebration or education?' 807; Richard L. Uppstrom, 'Planning toward the twenty first century at the United States Air Force Museum', Transport Museums, 15/16 (1988/89), 70-80, at 71-5; Robert Bradford, 'Canada's new National Aviation Museum', Transport Museums, 9 (1982), 44-54, at 44. Guillaume de Syon, 'The Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen', Technology and Culture, 40 (1999), 114-19, at 119. Michael K. Wustrack, 'The historical aviation collection of Flughafen Frankfurt Main AG', Transport Museums, 13/14 (1986/87), 27-32. Simmons, Transport Museums, 24; Czere, 'Presentation', 40; Alfred Waldis, 'Independent financing of museums', Transport Museums, 9 (1982), 55-66; 37

Making histories in transport museums Joachim Mucha, 'Some experience with exhibition and visitor policies at the Dresden Transport Museum', Transport Museums, 15/16 (1988/89), 81-2; Gottwaldt, 'Railway buildings', 40—1; Harold Leslie Pivnic, 'The South African Transport Services Museum', Transport Museums, 9 (1982), 36-43, at 36. 94. G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History, Longmans, Green, London, 2nd edn, 1946, 531.

38

2

Trains, planes, cars and boats: collecting and displaying

vehicles Much of the nineteenth-century museum achievement is still part of our physical and symbolic landscape. Sharon Macdonald (ed.), The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture,

Routledge, London, 1998,13

Most transport exhibitions conform to one of two models - 'either a vehicle for the display of objects or a space for telling a story'.1 This chapter looks at the former approach, one almost completely unchallenged until at least the 1970s and which still has some adherents. The glorious clutter and serried ranks of vehicles so typical of these exhibitions might be glorious indeed for knowledgeable visitors, but they were, and are, in all likelihood of limited appeal to visitors — or would-be visitors — who understand little about the objects displayed. And yet in some ways, as we argue in this chapter, even these object-centred and minimally-interpreted transport exhibitions are heirs to the celebratory and progressivist legacies of the nineteenth-century museum. Vehicles, collections and exhibitions Having acknowledged other forms of evidence about the past such as oral accounts, modern history museums are arguably less concerned than they used to be with collecting, classifying and displaying objects. Yet whatever the wider truth of this, it scarcely applies to transport museums.2 Vehicles have always been at the focus of their displays - smaller objects might be much more numerous but they are generally less striking and rarely the centre of attention. The specialist transport museums that exploded in number after the Second World War continued the nineteenth-century tradition of collecting and displaying trophies of humanity's triumph over time and distance through the mastery of mechanical and - to a far lesser degree animal power. Vehicles fulfil this role of trophy perfectly. They represent in material form the complex social practices of transport and travel in ways that trigger fantasies and memories while also eliciting admiration.3 These features are reinforced in the case of vehicles by virtue of their 39

Making histories in transport museums

sheer size: most transport displays are physically, and hence intellectually and affectively, dominated by them or, when the originals are truly large as in the case of ships or aircraft, their surrogates - models. How this came about is not, however, something that has been very carefully explored. While this book is chiefly concerned with the way that exhibitions make public histories, it is scarcely possible to understand how this works or might do so in the future without also considering briefly the nature of transport collecting, and in particular of the ways in which objects are classified - for as Susan Pearce points out, ordering objects into groups and sequences is still central to efforts at understanding the material remnants of the past.4 At the risk of stating the obvious, exhibitions usually involve a double process of selection: first of those objects to be saved and added to a museum's collection and then of those to be displayed. Just as historians have to make do with the documentary and other evidence that happens to have survived, so too exhibitors are to some extent in the hands of earlier generations of collectors and curators.5 Exhibitors are faced with the challenge of making histories with what Pearce calls the 'museum archive' the inherited resource of collections and their associated records that has inevitably been shaped by 'all too human . . . conflicts, confusions and absences', all of which inform and constrain the narratives that may be told about the past.6 Developing an exhibition about the history of commuting, for example, is easier if one has suburban rather than royal carriages to hand, buses and trams rather than racing cars. What then are the principles according to which transport objects are, or should be, collected and exhibited? Chapter 1 indicated our broad sympathies with semiotic approaches. We assume that the intrinsic characteristics of objects, their physical and functional qualities, are not all that needs to be considered. Rather, museum objects are signifers: in other words, a means of representing some other aspect of reality. (More loosely they may be referred to as signs, although strictly speaking a sign is the combination of a form such as a word, photograph or object - the signifier- and the idea or concept that it triggers - the signified.) As Tony Bennett, following Krzysztof Pomian, puts it, the Visible is significant not for its own sake but because it affords a glimpse of something beyond itself'.7 The significance of objects thus lies with what they can communicate about an otherwise hidden world - the history, present condition and future prospects of transport and travel. Michael J. Ettema's concept of analytical exhibitions relates such ideas firmly to the generality of history museums. The analytical display 'attempts to teach not just what happened but how and why it happened'. Thus it necessarily emphasizes abstract explanations for the concrete events of 40

Trains, planes, cars and boats history. In this view, interpretation situates objects in a context of ideas, values, and other social circumstances of their time. Education refers to the use of objects in the museum setting to stimulate questioning about historical processes and help communicate relevant abstractions.8 Henrietta Lidchi goes further, stressing the creative element of exhibition-making. Thus in dealing with6ideas - notions of what the world is, or should be', exhibitions do not simply issue objective descriptions or form logical assemblages; they generate representations and attribute value and meaning in line with certain perspectives or classificatory schemes which are historically specific. They do not so much reflect the world through objects as use them to mobilize representations of the world past and present.9 One consequence is that the messages communicated by museum objects — their meaning for visitors — may change along with the way they are classified. Indeed the meaning of any artefact changes throughout its life, as it is first built or made, then used, made redundant and discarded, and, in the case of museum objects, then collected, stored and displayed and even eventually de-accessioned and discarded once again. The palimpsest is a useful metaphor for the process whereby new layers of meaning are superimposed over older ones as an object moves from one context to the next: we can think of objects as elements which participate in a 'continuous history'. .. , where the makers, collectors and curators are simply points of origination, congregation and dispersal ...: a history that extends 'from origin to current destination, including the changing meanings as the object is continually redefined along the way'.10 Such explicitly semiotic perspectives are not, however, typical of transport museums, at least for much of their history: formalist models of exhibitions and typologies are more common. Formalism is a tradition with deep roots in the earliest public museums, sharing a good deal with the common-sense view that the inherent qualities of objects are what is most important about them - displayed objects 'speak for themselves'. Today, formalism also assumes a particular conception of the nature of history and the way museum objects communicate a sense of the past. It stresses, in Ettema's words, 'history as factual learning about the past! On this account the word interpretation refers to the discovery of information that identifies artifacts by date, maker, function, and place of origin, and which locates them in a stylistic or technological sequence of like objects. Education then is simply a matter of disseminating this information.11 41

Making histories in transport museums It is important to note, however, that even with this emphasis on Tactual learning', formalist displays were, historically at any rate, intended to convey value-laden messages. In the nineteenth century, gazing on objects was supposed to redeem those who, by reason of class, gender or ethnicity, were not fortunate enough to share the values of the social elite exhibitions were put on with the clear purpose of inculcating social and moral improvement by superior example. This, as Ettema argues, relied on the belief that 'objects expressed the spirit of the people that made and used them'; in other words that artefacts seemed to actually contain abstract moral qualities that would be selfevident in their appearance. The physical nature of artefacts was merely a reflection of their spiritual nature. By exhibiting the best products of human civilisation, museums would communicate those vital qualities to the public.12 There was, in other words, a dimension to objects beyond the physical. Although most curators in the twentieth century came to the view that historical objects did not literally contain moral qualities and that type classifications based upon intrinsic qualities failed to capture what was most important about them as markers of the past, the capacity of 'factual' displays to imply, or connote, certain narratives about the past is still highly relevant to understanding transport museums.13 In particular, serried ranks of objects with labels focusing on technical-functional qualities echo the formalist style established in technical museums in the nineteenth century. Such techniques were already being supplemented, if not superseded, in some of these institutions prior to 1939. But one of the most striking characteristics of transport museums is - to wrench Ian Hodder's phrase from a very different context - their pattern of 'retarded borrowing', their uncanny ability to take from other museums not the best of contemporary practice but that of one or two generations earlier.14 And since any exhibition assumes a collection of some sort it is to the analysis of transport collecting and classification that we first turn our attention. Collecting and classifying transport Although this is increasingly controversial, museum collections of all kinds have traditionally been distinguished from lesser gatherings of objects - and particularly those of private collectors - by arguing that they are rigorously classified.15 According to Susan Pearce, for example, systematic collecting with its 'apparent capacity to demonstrate understanding rather than feeling, and so to extend our control of the world' is the benchmark against which all other kinds of collecting tend to be judged. Its classic manifestations are the catalogue and the ordered display. 42

Trains, planes, cars and boats

Briefly, systematic collecting draws upon nineteenth-century traditions of classification, taxonomy or typology (we treat the terms as synonyms) developed first in the natural sciences and later applied to archaeological, historical and ethnographic collections. These taxonomies focused on what were taken to be the intrinsic qualities of objects, grouping specimens according to hierarchical, nested categories of phyla, genera and species in ways that were thought to be impersonal and universal.16 By contrast individuals, particularly enthusiasts, are more likely to order their collections in ways that lack what Pearce calls an 'intellectual rationale'. Some collections are little more than souvenirs, reminders of places, events or people of purely personal significance. Others claim a wider, less personal importance, employing an ordered set that is recognized and sanctioned by a particular group - stamps or cigarette cards, for example, or perhaps platform tickets. However, the classificatory schema governing such collections are not universally recognized; they have 'no rhyme or reason outside the covers of the album'.17 This perspective nicely complements the sociological understanding of enthusiasts, introduced in Chapter 1, as producers of things, services or performances intended primarily for consumption within a fairly closed circle. Whether or not Pearce's distinction has any purchase in the wider world of museums it has only a limited validity with regard to transport collections because they have rarely, if at all, been systematically classified in the nineteenth-century manner. Instead collectors have developed semi-formal categorizations based on those of the industries from which vehicles and other objects hail or, in the case of pre-industrial transport, from folk classifications. All of these are strongly technical and functional in character. They are, of course, equally available to museum curators and lay collectors, and so the differences between museum and private collections can easily be exaggerated. On the other hand, there are useful distinctions to be made. Some collectors — be they museum curators or enthusiasts — are more willing than others to acknowledge the fact that classification turns as much on matters of social context as on the inherent qualities of objects. The first point may be asserted with some confidence: we are not aware of any transport collections that have been catalogued strictly and entirely in the systematic manner of the nineteenth century. The Science Museum's cataloguing in the early 1930s of its land transport collection is a case in point. The railway section was hierarchical and nested (there were only two levels) but at the lower level it resorted to a mix of categories mainly operating function, date and technical components - to impose order. This could lead to some curious results; for instance, the category 'Steam Locomotives, 1830-1880' contained object 47, 'Handkerchief with views of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, 1831 '.18 Stretching Pearce's 43

Making histories in transport museums

meaning a little, all transport collections are in some degree 'undisciplined', a useful term because it reminds one that initially in the nineteenth century the ordering of museum collections was an integral part of the development of academic disciplines.19 Most relevantly for our purposes, technical collections in France, the USA and Britain - and almost certainly elsewhere - played a crucial role in the growth of a new understanding of machines. As John Pickstone makes clear, this was based upon the cognitive (and sometimes to enable this, the physical) decomposition of machines, followed by inquiry into how the internal relationship of the components produced the manifest characteristics and capacities of the whole. Classifying machines thus depended on understanding them both analytically and functionally. The high noon of this museological mode of understanding did not last beyond, very roughly, 1870 as the principal locus of scholarly inquiry shifted to the new laboratories of universities and similar institutions of higher learning. Yet, despite being shorn of its intellectual rationale, this kind of classification continued to be used in industrial and technical museums, often being extended to embrace chronological sequences of machines.20 This engineering taxonomy has had some influence on attempts at classifying transport objects, particularly vehicles. But its influence has been fairly limited, perhaps partly because dedicated transport collections did not emerge until well after the intellectual impetus for rigorous classification disappeared in technical museums. On the whole, curators have instead relied heavily on the classifications developed by the transport industries for their own purposes — in museological terms, a degenerate form of engineering taxonomy. There is, however, more than a superficial resemblance between these industrially-derived schemes of classification and aspects of the nineteenthcentury engineering systematics since, for obvious practical reasons, transport industries tend to use typologies that are strongly technical and functional. Railways serve as our exemplar. Of all their component technologies, the locomotive is perhaps the most complex and interesting technologically (and semiotically). Operators have always classified locomotives according to technical characteristics and operating (that is, functional) capabilities. In Britain, for instance, steam engines were divided into types such as express passenger, stopping passenger, mixed traffic, heavy goods, pick-up goods and shunting. These functional capabilities related to technical characteristics in fairly straightforward and often manifest ways, so that, for example, a steam locomotive for hauling coal trains over long distances would be easily recognizable by its large boiler and many (up to ten) small driving wheels. Such rough and ready categorizations were developed and, in some degree, formalized into quite sophisticated schemes. Initially, in the first half of nineteenth century, locomotive fleets 44

Trains, planes, cars and boats

were small and the variation between engines so extensive that there was little point in doing more than identifying individual machines, often at first by name but quite soon by number as well. But the sometimes contradictory processes of functional specialization and technical standardization brought into being numerous classes of similar machines, each type designed for one or more of the purposes just outlined. Each class received its own designation, often with sub-categories covering major and minor differences in initial design or modifications made in service. For example, the NER's heavy mineral engines with eight driving wheels (and no others) became the T class, with versions designated Tl, T2 and so on. Although the detail of classification altered considerably with the coming of modern diesel and electric traction, the basic principles remain today, in Britain and elsewhere. Similar considerations apply to other transport industries, although there are differences. With cars and commercial road vehicles, for instance, manufacturers' brand names and model types are particularly important because these have long been crucial in selling vehicles. Superficial changes in body styling, for example, are often more important for sales than changes in technical specifications of a kind that would register in an engineering taxonomy. It is even possible to apply the general argument to those forms of transport, such as animal-powered wagons or narrowboats, that belonged, at least at first, to pre-industrial craft traditions of manufacture and use. Nineteenth-century carriage and wagon builders, for instance, had their own typologies that were later readily adopted by museums.21 The backgrounds of the very first transport curators go some way to explaining their adoption of industrial classifications. Although little is known about them as a group, certainly some, and perhaps most, began their careers in transport or engineering, no doubt inclining them to use typologies with which they were familiar. Thus for example the Smithsonian's first curator of railways and steam transport, J. Elfreth Watkins, had been a civil engineer on a subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad before he joined the museum in the mid-1880s. After his death in service in 1903 he was replaced by men who were not railway experts and who had many other, more important duties; it is understandable that these curators, burdened with the responsibility of building up and looking after collections under difficult circumstances, did not place a priority on developing novel classificatory systems. Similarly in Britain, Thomas Sheppard, curator of the transport collections at Hull Municipal Museum, was a former employee of the NER, while J. B. Harper, the man first responsible for that company's collection in York in the 1920s, was a middle-ranking railway official.22 The corporate origins of some transport museums also helps to explain 45

Making histories in transport museums

the popularity of industrial classifications - a company car museum, for instance, is obviously going to feature the manufacturer's brands. And when enthusiasts are the driving force behind a collection, as they have been for so many since the Second World War, they are usually pleased to take over the ready-made classifications provided by the industries they admire. As Pearce points out, all these classificatory schemes have slowly been extended to embrace 'contextual matters to do with a broader knowledge and understanding of [vehicles'] function, location and history'. As we have already hinted with the example of the Science Museum, typologies developed from the 1930s to order small transport collections in general history museums employed vocabularies that went beyond objects' intrinsic characteristics, mixing terms drawn from the contexts of daily use and industrial production.23 The same is true of the more complex hierarchical typologies developed much more recently by some specialist museums, such as the NRM. Classifying objects in this way acknowledges, however inadequately, that they had and have a social meaning or significance that cannot be captured simply by reference to technical characteristics and operational capabilities. But classification based on the latter remains an attractive option for many collectors and museums, partly because as we now argue it provides a clear structure within which collecting and then exhibiting can take place. Collecting: to what purpose? Many specialist transport collections were not at first built up with a clear purpose in mind. Sometimes their origins have lain with the personal predilections of groups of individuals and they have only retrospectively been ordered according to an ostensibly more rational system of classification. In this they are hardly unique: something similar was true of many of the great public technical collections of the nineteenth century, not to mention collections in other areas entirely, such as fine art.24 Nevertheless the idea of a complete collection is one aspect of that century's approach to classification that has had an enduring influence in the realm of transport. A complete collection has an exemplar of each type of object. Building up such a collection is therefore a systematic and unambiguous process however difficult in practice - because it is simply a matter of 'filling in the gaps' according to the given typology. The circumstances under which transport collections start often make this a particularly attractive way of proceeding. Many, particularly those founded by enthusiasts, are in effect the equivalent of rescue digs undertaken by archaeologists; acquisition at the point of obsolescence, arguably the distinguishing characteristic of 46

Trains, planes, cars and boats

transport collecting, places a priority on saving vehicles and associated infrastructure before they are scrapped. Collectors then simply employ existing typologies to identify 'gaps' among existing collections. Something like this happened in the USA with the boom in streetcar collecting from the late 1940s through to the very early 1960s as the last major city systems were abandoned. Numerous groups and even individuals each strove to develop a 'comprehensive' collection.25 Practical issues often temper attempts to build a complete collection. If space is at a premium, as it often is with transport collections, then how does one select the most important types? This problem was faced by technical museums in the late nineteenth century as they struggled to collect and display their 'comprehensive' collections and were forced to choose between 'treasures' or a selection of more 'typical' examples.26 One solution is to narrow the range of a collection so that a complete one, or something close to it, becomes possible. In the 1990s for instance, a private venture, the National Diesel Railcar Museum, tried to gather an example of each type of the lightweight trains that revolutionized passenger travel on British Railways from the mid-1950s. Similarly, occasionally a car museum features just one model from a particular marque, as for example with the Corvette museum at Bowling Green, Kentucky.27 The social organization of collecting can have an important bearing on its success. In the USA for instance, despite the large number of streetcars saved from the 1940s, not all that were regarded as desirable were bought (although one should not be too critical since without enthusiasts only 'a token few' streetcars would have survived, in the collections of public museums).28 As Andrew Young, the historian of the movement, argues, 'planning was a luxury few groups felt they could afford'; the drive for comprehensive collections led to excessive duplication of some commoner types, drove up the prices of rarer cars far above scrap values, and led to the unnecessary loss of some vehicles of regional or local interest. Tramcar enthusiasts in Britain largely avoided this error, working cooperatively through the Tramway Museum Society to build up a collection of tramcars that forms the basis of one of the best museums of urban transport in the world.29 More speculatively, there are certain traits to transport collecting, particularly that by enthusiasts, that might bear further analysis in terms of Pearce's concept of fetishistic collectors. These are defined as people who value objects to the point of obsession for their intrinsic qualities, detaching them entirely from any social context. While acknowledging that collecting fulfils an important role in shaping many individuals' sense of self - another parallel with the sociological literature on enthusiasts Pearce suggests that in the fetishistic mode 47

Making histories in transport museums the personality of the collector, in a very particular sense, is the mainspring of this kind of collecting activity and runs beneath much collection-forming which is ostensibly presented in a more intellectual, dignified and objective way . . . The urge is to samples, and as many as possible, rather than to examples . . . The whole process is a deployment of the possessive self, a strategy of desire.30

Thus it might be argued that the reluctance of US streetcar preservationists to cooperate was at least partly because what mattered most was possession of vehicles - cooperation might have resulted in title being ceded to others. And at an even more speculative level, perhaps the collectivist, social democratic political ethos of post-war Britain encouraged a more cooperative solution there. Such national differences in the organization and practice of collecting deserve more careful and thorough analysis that we can offer here. So too does the fact that some enthusiasts seem prone to extend industrial systems of classification in order to justify the collecting of more and more samples by recategorizing them as 'examples'. Such developments often focus on the literally superficial. In the 1980s and 1990s, for example, numerous diesel locomotives were bought privately in Britain. The first group to express an interest in any particular class (as defined by the railways' own typology) usually found an appeal for money, couched in terms of saving a representative of the type, was successful. But saving a single example was rarely enough. Other individuals and groups would appear on the scene (suggesting that Pearce's comment about the possessive nature of collecting has some purchase) and display considerable ingenuity in justifying their choice by pointing to minor differences between their locomotive and those of other preservationists. These differences were sometimes acknowledged in the railways' typology, allowing collectors to say that they were contributing to the establishment of a complete collection. But this was not all. Once the railways' classificatory scheme had been exhausted it almost always proved possible to discern even more minor differences. Thus, for example, an attempt to collect the very last Teak' class diesel to survive in a scrapyard pointed out that 'No. 45015 is the oldest surviving "Peak" and the only one left to have been fitted with nose end doors when new'.31 Individual transport museums rarely have the space to indulge in such niceties: they have to chose which 'representative' examples to collect. How they do this also needs more investigation. Kenneth Hudson has suggested that transport museums should decide 'whether they are technical museums or social history museums', and although this is going too far - technology is fully part of history, as we argue later - the long tradition of collecting according to technical—functional classifications means that until comparatively recently curators did not give much 48

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attention to the social contexts that gave vehicles and other transport objects meaning.32 Indeed it is still quite common to find collecting policies that embrace an uneasy mix of two rationales, one based upon traditional technical—functional classifications, the other on more or less clearly defined notions of 'historic significance'. Not surprisingly, this has deeply influenced the history of exhibitionary practices in transport museums. 'Gloriously cluttered places' and serried ranks: traditional approaches to exhibiting transport Formalism is a very useful category. However transport displays are both cruder and, occasionally, more sophisticated than Ettema's typology allows. Goran Agren and Per-Uno Carlsson's typology of exhibition languages, as explicated by Gaynor Kavanagh, nicely captures this range of philosphies of display. Two - the mass and label exhibitions - are unequivocally relevant here, while a third, the thematic exhibition, acts as a bridge to the more explicitly semiotic approaches to display discussed in the following chapters. The mass exhibition gathers together a jumbled selection of objects, with minimal labelling of individual items and no attempt at all at a more general thematic structure. This kind of display is clearly formalist in the sense that it is object-centred, but in refusing any consistent ordering it forces visitors to rely almost entirely on their own resources if they are to take any sense of the past.'Here are some old things', visitors are implicitly told,'make of them what you will'. They may well make a good deal out of them of course, but only if objects trigger personal memories or because in David Lowenthal's term they are relics, tangible reminders that 'light up the past only when we already know they belong to it'.33 The label exhibition - although we substitute the terms 'series' or 'type' - is much closer to Ettema's strict definition of formalism. Type exhibitions provide visitors with some interpretation of individual objects in the form of labels giving basic information on type, provenance and so on, and ordering objects in series based upon their intrinsic properties. Any series, as we have seen, draws upon a typology. But even if the basis of this is spelt out to visitors, they are not given help in comprehending the wider contexts which gave the objects meaning in the past - what is offered is, in Kavanagh's highly apt phrase, 'a visual catalogue'.34 Finally come thematic exhibitions. These are also object-centred but fall less clearly under the formalist heading. Objects are grouped according to 'strictly defined topics' which 'sometimes' derive from the classification system of the collection. Thematic exhibitions also make some reference to the fact that museum objects originally had a social purpose; 49

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for example they might treat topics such as 'domestic life', 'law and order', 'dairying','local trades'or 'toys', while photographs and general explanatory labels might in a limited way extend the chosen theme. The most sophisticated form of this exhibition employs diorama, tableaux, reconstructions and other attempts at displaying objects grouped 'realistically'. Such contextual displays go beyond the boundaries of formalism strictly defined because there are no stylistic or technological sequences of objects. On the other hand, thematic displays do tend to imply that history is a matter of factual learning - 'such exhibitions tend not to move beyond the technical or descriptive' - and so we include them here as a variant of formalism.35 None of these categories is sharply defined; they shade into one another and are used here merely as aids to understanding the forms transport displays can take. Enumerating the museums that embrace some combination of the three would be a lengthy and perhaps futile business. But it is worth briefly describing a number of examples. Doing so allows us to develop three points. First, formalist ideas, broadly conceived, continue to be influential. Secondly, the practical challenges peculiar to transport collections go some way to explaining the attraction of formalism. And thirdly mass, type and thematic exhibitions are not so lacking in wider historical associations as is commonly supposed; they may suggest or connote important narratives about the past. Mass exhibitions of transport can occasionally be found in a more or less pure form. An extreme example is the transport section of Danmarks Tekniske Museum (Danish National Museum of Science and Technology) in Elsinore, which in 1994 consisted of a warehouse packed full of a jumble of vehicles of all kinds. A typical arrangement placed a small narrow-gauge steam locomotive dating from 1907 next to a saloon car from (probably) the inter-war era. Less confused and confusing, simply because it is a museum of just one mode of transport, is the New South Wales State Rail Museum at Thirlmere. Here a rich static collection of locomotives and rolling stock is lined up for the most part in no apparent order with minimal labelling. This kind of display is very common in railway museums around the world. Some of the best-known British transport museums were no better, although the truly mass exhibition is now rare, at least outside the circle of small specialist collections. The first museum of railway vehicles in York (Queen Street), which remained open until 1973, was a closely packed and unordered space, while the Museum of British Transport at Clapham, also closed in 1973, was 'a gloriously cluttered place', juxtaposing all kinds of vehicles according to no system. For example, as illustrated in Figure 2.1, the record-breaking steam locomotive Mallard of the 1930s was somewhat incongruously sandwiched between an Edwardian London 50

Figure 2.1 The Museum of British Transport at Clapham, South London, in the 1960s. Photo, National Railway Museum.

Making histories in transport museums

tramcar (albeit restored to 1930s condition) and an earlier CB' Type bus from the same city. The Clapham museum was not, however, a pure example of the mass exhibition; short series of certain kinds of vehicles for instance tramcars — were to be found among the general confusion.36 The series or type exhibition is very common indeed. The Museum of Transport in Glasgow, relocated and comprehensively redisplayed in 1987, is a good and in 2001 still extant example. The main hall divides vehicles primarily according to mode. A couple of Glasgow's motorbuses and a solitary trolleybus are to the extreme left of the hall, next to seven of the city's tramcars. Then come four railway tracks, upon which are positioned six steam locomotives that worked in Scotland, plus a royal carriage. In front of all of these is lined up a large collection of motor cars. The rows of tramcars are an excellent example of the serried approach, with the seven cars arranged chronologically. The motor cars are similarly laid out. As the Glasgow example suggests, general museums of transport often divide their displays according to individual modes of transport, emphasizing, if emphasis be needed, the strength of industrial systems of classification. The numerous museums dedicated to individual modes of transport further underlines the point. These often order their displays by type; car museums, which have makers' classifications readily to hand, are particularly keen on serried ranks of vehicles. The Heritage Motor Centre near Coventry adopted this technique for its principal display, opened in 1993, as did the extremely well-funded Toyota Museum in Japan, opened in 1989.37 Similarly the upper gallery at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, opened in 1994, is populated almost solely by lines of cars which the knowledgeable can enjoy 'with no historical or sociological distractions'.38 Perhaps the most spectacular exhibition in the world of this kind is to be found at the Musee National de 1'Automobile (Collection Schlumpf) National Motor Museum in Mulhouse, France. Opened in 1982 and housed in an old textile mill extensively remodelled for its new purpose, the main exhibition (Figure 2.2) consists of row upon row of immaculate, beautifully restored and minimally labelled cars, some 500 in all, each line taking its place within a complex matrix of categorizations. Chronological classifications (early cars) mix with those by function (racing, luxury, family and so on) and make (Bugatti, Rolls Royce, Citroen, etc.), the hierarchy within which categories are nested varying from one location within the museum to another.39 Figure 2.3 shows one example of this arrangement, a row of Bugatti racing cars lined up more or less in chronological order. Other forms of motorized road transport adopt similar modes of presentation, even if none can quite rival the splendid visual folly of Mulhouse. For example, the National Motorcycle Museum, Birmingham (opened in 1984) displayed a good proportion of its collection of nearly 52

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Figure 2.2 The Musee National de 1'Automobile (Collection Schlumpf), Mulhouse, France, in 1998.

Figure 2.3 Bugatti sports cars displayed at Mulhouse in 1998. 53

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300 machines in chronological order of manufacture. Two other exhibitions there showed motorbikes of over and under SOOcc engine capacity (the latter then grouping at least some machines according to technical characteristics), while yet another focused on competition machinery.40 Museums of urban transport, with their collections of buses, trolleybuses and trams, have also commonly employed type exhibitions. The HT Museum for Sporvogne og Busser (HT Museum of Trams and Buses) in Copenhagen, a single-room display run by the city's transport authority as part of a bus garage deep in the suburbs, is a nice example of this sort of approach; buses, trolleys and horse and electric trams take their allotted places like with like (Figure 2.4). Railway museums, or those parts of them that have moved beyond the mass exhibition, often include type displays of one sort or another. For example the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Museum, splendidly located since 1953 in Baltimore's historic Mount Clare repair workshops, displays many of its major pieces inside the shops. This exhibition of individual locomotives and items of rolling stock has long been ordered as a basically chronological series arranged around the turntable, although as John H. White noted in 1970, 'many visitors prefer to cut back and forth across the floor . . . thus dutifully avoiding any planned viewing'.41 The Musee Frangais du Chemin de Per (French Railway Museum), Mulhouse, opened on its present site in 1976, displays most of its vehicles according to a hierarchical system of classification. First they are divided between motive power and rolling stock, or that combination of the two, the railcar; and then subdivided by function or technical characteristics. Steam locomotives, for instance, are divided from electric ones, passenger carriages from goods stock. Examples of each subtype are methodically lined up in long rows, arranged for the most part chronologically according to date of manufacture.42 Thematic displays are also quite common. Different kinds of vehicles are often grouped, for example, to suggest the purposes for which they were used. Railway museums often arrange locomotives and coaches together as passenger 'trains', or put an engine and wagons together under the heading of transporting goods - the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania does this as does the B&O Railroad Museum with its outdoor displays. Smaller objects can also conveniently be arranged according to themes. The NRM devotes a whole balcony gallery to a rich display of models and small objects such as tickets, badges and working documents grouped in cabinets according to some of the many different tasks needed to work a railway - timetabling, ticketing and so on. As we have already remarked, this kind of display evinces the beginnings of an awareness of the social meaning of transport objects, but a deep-rooted concern for classification according to technical-functional characteristics 54

Figure 2.4 The HT Museum, Copenhagen, in 1994.

Making histories in transport museums

is often evident in the arrangement of objects within each display and in the sort of information included in labels. It is easy to criticize the widespread adoption of formalist perspectives. But there are practical reasons that go some way to explain why they were so influential and have survived so long. Transport curators have always faced huge problems of storage and conservation, and these in turn long dominated considerations of display; in many museums they still do. And the cost of remaking exhibitions can also be an important factor in explaining their longevity. Bernard S. Finn's comment that for this reason technical displays are 'likely to remain frozen long after errors are acknowledged or beneficial modifications identified' applies equally to transport.43 Money is a real constraint. While not all are so - bicycles are an exception, for example - many vehicles are large and hence costly to store, conserve and maintain. Even the mostly heavily built or well maintained artefacts cannot last forever outside. In the late 1980s the Verkehrshaus der Schweiz (Swiss Museum of Transport and Communication) at Lucerne, for example, planned to write off an important outside exhibit, a carefully conserved Convair 900 Coronado aeroplane, after 35 to 50 years.44 Thus at some point most museums decide that their most valuable artefacts must be sheltered if they are to have a long-term future. The space that is provided for this purpose then tends to become - but only secondarily the main focus of public display. Given the high cost of housing, it is understandable that as many vehicles as possible are usually crammed in. The store becomes the exhibition — as, for instance, in Elsinore and Thirlmere. Curators are usually aware of the shortcomings of this type of display, but they would argue that it is better to get objects under cover and allow some kind of public access than to shut them off on the grounds that the exhibition is not all that it might be. In the 1990s the idea of open storage turned this philosophy imaginatively on its head, recognizing that many visitors relish the chance to rummage through a museum's store of uninterpreted objects. For instance 'The Warehouse', opened in 1999 as a major part of a large extension to the covered area of the NRM, developed the concept to the full. An open store for large and small objects alike, many of the latter were housed in specially constructed cabinets designed to withstand the constant wear and tear of enquiring hands and minds (Figure 2.5). On the other hand this strategy is only really open to that fortunate elite among museums that has the money, space and curatorial resources to provide highly interpreted exhibitions elsewhere: after all a store is defined by contrast with what is normally offered in the spaces open to public view. Other practical considerations go some way towards accounting for the 56

Figure 2.5 The Warehouse, National Railway Museum, York, in 2000. Photo, National Railway Museum.

Making histories in transport museums

fondness for rows. The technical characteristics of some vehicles, particularly railed ones, suit them to this approach, especially when exhibition halls are converted railway structures such as stations, warehouses or engine sheds with their ready-laid lines of tracks few curators can literally afford to ignore; floating ships, boats, barges and narrowboats are also likely to be displayed in lines since they will usually be berthed along a pier, quay, or wharf for ease of access. Similarly, large aircraft displayed outside at old airfields will often be lined up for convenience along that most linear of surfaces, the runway. Occasionally there are other practical constraints not apparent to casual inspection; the loading characteristics of the floor at the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden, for example, severely limit where vehicles can be put. A rank or a series is more than a row, however, and so one is left with the question of why exhibitors have been so fond of arranging vehicles in the ways they have. The immediate answer lies of course with traditional systems of classification. Serried ranks of vehicles are simply visual catalogues - to recall Kavanagh's description - of these longestablished typologies. But there are deeper reasons as well. Exhibitors are, perhaps unwittingly, the heirs to the kind of progressivist philosophies of exhibition sketched in Chapter 1. They might well believe that an exhibition is simply a space in which vehicles and other objects are displayed according to an industrially-derived classificatory scheme, or none. But formalist displays of transport can connote more than they denote by way of minimal interpretation such as labels. Beautifully restored vehicles are admired by visitors for their aesthetic glories, but both individually and en masse this very splendour can be perceived by some as a kind of visual code conveying certain messages about the past - and the present and future. Serried ranks in particular can have very powerful connotations, all the more so when the ranking includes an element of chronological ordering; the 'time line' is just one of several ways of suggesting a narrative of progress. We call these kinds of exhibition 'whiggish'. The rest of this chapter analyses in more detail the ideas about understanding the past that inform them; shows generally how exhibitions of technological objects may connote whiggish ideas; and finally explores how one formalist exhibition of transport can be understood in this way. Encoding and decoding transport First we consider in a little more detail some theoretical ideas about how exhibitions communicate (or fail to communicate) messages about the past. Not all these ideas are immediately relevant to formalist exhibitions but it is convenient to introduce them here as a body, partly because of 58

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the close connections between them, and partly because we shall need them in subsequent chapters to analyse other kinds of exhibitions. Like any sign, objects on display only convey meaning when visitors grasp the relationship between what they sense (the signifier) and what is thereby represented (the signified). The relationship is fixed by codes that are socially produced and partly specific to a given culture - a point developed in Chapter 4. As we have already noted, systems of classification and objects' meanings may change even as the physical form remains more or less the same. Clearly, if for any reason visitors are not aware of, or do not understand, these codes then they will not be able to grasp an object's significance. Of course, many museums have long recognized that decoding is not a straightforward matter and assist visitors by providing aids to interpretation - the most familiar and oldest being the label - in order to make comprehensible what is unfamiliar, 'to establish a "reading" of ... an object'. Yet even such helpful gestures are not quite what they seem, for in order to make meaning clearer all acts of interpretation (that is, decoding) necessarily emphasize one (or at any rate, a small number) of meanings from the multitude of possibilities. Interpretation is thus simultaneously an instance of 'encoding', a creative act of selection from among the various codes (of written English, for instance, or photographic images) that it is assumed that visitors will understand, undertaken with the intention of directing visitors towards the preferred 'reading' of an exhibition.45 This poetics - creation of meaning - is not solely dependent on labels, if indeed these are employed at all. Rather, as we briefly mentioned in Chapter 1, it turns on the totality of the internal arrangement of a display's components: the objects and other original artefacts (photographs or documents perhaps), plus the various kinds of interpretive 'texts' — written labels and catalogues for instance, but also perhaps oral testimony, recreated sounds and smells or visual clues (graphic panels) — that individually and collectively help direct visitors towards a 'reading'. The importance of context needs to be stressed here; the intended meaning of any particular item in an exhibition depends upon its relationship with some or all of the other components.46 All exhibitions may therefore be analysed according to the ways in which their components are ordered and encoded to produce meaning. Many writers emphasize the distinctive ways in which the past is represented in material form in museums and heritage sites. Unlike the literary texts of academic histories, for example, the spatial arrangement of artefacts and images and the associated circulation of visitors are important; this, as we discuss in Chapter 5, has particular implications for heritage transport.47 These various conventions of representation inform and constrain the messages about the past that an exhibition commu59

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nicates. As David Brett remarks, they are 'not a neutral medium through which, transparently, a message passes unaltered from sender to receiver'; rather, they have a 'formative power over the content of understanding' as each constitutes a symbolic form which is itself 'a participant in the creation of the meaning' or 'a way of construing the world'.48 Three conventions chiefly concern us in this book: those of visualization, of simulation, and of narrative structure. The first refers to certain concepts formed during the eighteenth century in relation to the aesthetic appreciation of nature but which, particularly through the development of tourism, became widely applied from the nineteenth century onwards. These 'deeply rooted and almost invisible cultural assumptions and the languages of taste' embodied in literature, architecture and other cultural forms, including pictures and other images such as photography, inform what is widely known as the 'aestheticisation of history', the transformation of the past into a modern-day spectacle. Such codes can be so deeply rooted that exhibitors use them almost without being aware of the fact and they must of course also be understood, perhaps tacitly, by visitors if they are to take the preferred meanings from displays. These codes and assumptions prefigure a particular way of understanding the past; in other words, they incline the visitor to 'read' an exhibition in a certain way.49 There are two important sets of visual conventions - the picturesque and the sublime. Technology is perhaps more readily associated with the latter - 'the past as mysterious and awesome', transferred to the realm of industry as the technological sublime, has a particular bearing on the exhibition of transport in museums. Nevertheless, as will become apparent both in this chapter and Chapter 5, the idea of the industrial or technological picturesque is not without application. Moreover both these modes of pictorial representation may embody a 'visual ideology' - that is, the various formal and thematic elements of an exhibition combine to communicate a partial, selective perspective on the past that sustains, and is sustained by, the power of a social class or group.50 As well as the importance of visual forms of encoding many writers draw attention to the closely associated conventions of simulation. These also have deep historical roots and embrace far more than museum displays; as we indicated in Chapter 1, in the nineteenth century they included, for example, spectacular events such as international exhibitions. While visual forms of simulation have historically been the most important, the term includes all attempts at 'accurate replication in three-dimensional form' including the employment of real people and the mimicking of sound, taste and smell. In its most extreme form simulation produces the simulacrum, a superficially perfect copy of objects and environments that offer what appears to be an unmediated or direct confrontation with the past.51 In the musem context Susan Pearce calls this sort of technique a 'resurrection of the body' of the 60

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past, using artefacts and other material with the purpose of 'simulation, of the re-creation of the past within a closed environment where belief should be suspended, as the key distinguishing characteristic'.52 As we discuss in the next chapter, transport museums have increasingly employed models, dioramas (another convention with roots in the early nineteenth century) and other 'realist' modes of representation in the search for mimesis or verisimilitude. But the modern contexts of display can obscure the original, historical meanings of objects. Henrietta Lidchi points out that in reconstructions the display of authentic objects naturalizes the overall presentation - 'as the objects appear naturally suited to this context, seeming to speak for or represent themselves'.53 And Ludmilla Jordanova warns that such representational practices can be particularly coercive. Precisely because they appear to represent the past literally - 'telling it as it really was' - they tend to deflect visitors'attention from the highly selective way in which any simulation is made. At any given time, certain of the cultural assumptions that inform an exhibition will 'strike home more effectively than others', partly because they are part and parcel of popular consciousness. Displays that exploit this fact are coercive in the sense that they do not allow (or at any rate, encourage) visitors to reflect critically upon what they already 'know', and in so doing they may help to sustain ways of understanding the past that accord with very particular social interests.54 The third set of conventions, narrative structure, covers the spatial arrangements of buildings (including museums), exhibitions and other sites of display, revealing the ways in 'they set up, suggest or assert relationships between whatever is displayed in those spaces'.55 Visitors' circulation through an exhibition is critically important; this shapes the narrative visitors are supposed to be persuaded by. Circulation may be directive, that is a pattern that must be followed and which orders the displays according to some explanatory structure or historical sequence, not readily allowing for alternative narratives. Or it can be non-directive, allowing or even encouraging visitors to wander more or less at will, and abandoning any attempt at imposing a grand explanation. In either case it is also a form of social ordering, or 'spatialised etiquette' in the sense that visitors are expected to conform to the conventions. Of course some visitors, deliberately or unintentionally, resist or subvert these conventions and thus the intended meanings.56 Although all three conventions are germane to transport their relative importance varies from museum to museum. As we have already argued, historically most transport exhibitions were formalist affairs displaying objects apparently stripped of most, if not all, of the social and physical contexts that originally gave them meaning; such exhibitions seem to have little to say about the past. But under these circumstances the visual codes 61

Making histories in transport museums and spatial arrangements of an exhibition are of the utmost importance, for they can connote narratives or thematics that, because they function in the present-day as myths, demand critical analysis. In the next section we turn our attention to the kinds of progressivist myths that can become embodied in formalist displays. Whiggish histories of transport Whiggish histories of technology offer an explication of 'progress' that is applicable to many transport exhibitions. Such histories are a variant of internalist accounts; these describe the technological characteristics of artefacts from the largest and the most powerful, such as locomotives, ships, and aeroplanes, to - in principle if rarely in practice - the smallest and humblest of everyday technologies, such as ticket machines or station clocks.57 Whiggism traces a particular trajectory through the myriad changes to these technologies, giving heroic (the gendered term is deliberate) narratives, concentrating on the successful designs of 'great engineers' and telling stories of ever-improving technology. Like its counterpart in political historiography, it selects from the messy complexity of the past in order to present modern achievements as the culmination of earlier 'successes'; failures appear only as quaint oddities, deviations from the true path. Whiggish history of technology is then about 'progress', conceived most obviously in a very particular sense as technological advance. Whiggism is also about experts, again of a particular and gendered kind — the male engineer as hero. Little or nothing is written about the influence on artefactual design of other groups or individuals; users of certain kinds of public transport, for instance, were and are more likely to be female than the engineers who created the technologies. Technological progress is not, of course, altogether an illusion: machines and devices do improve. But the criteria against which progress is judged need to be made clear, for improvements are rarely as smooth or as uncontroversial as whiggism pretends. Usually these criteria are assumed to refer in an unproblematic way to the functional or technicalphysical capacities of artefacts - which is why the object-centred approach of formalist exhibitions is a perfect vehicle for exhibiting this way of understanding the past. Technical criteria might include increasing levels of power, improved power-to-weight ratios, higher speeds, better thermal efficiency, and so on. A whiggish history of the steam locomotive might discuss improvements in these spheres resulting from nearly two centuries of incremental change, from Richard Trevithick's Pen-y-Darren engine of 1804 through to the continuing - if now extremely rare experiments inspired by the work of the French engineer, Andre

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Chapelon. Although one may disagree that the technical characteristics of an object are what is most interesting about it, once the point has been ceded only those with the requisite level of technological expertise may engage in debate as to the soundness of this or that design. Only an engineer - or someone with the equivalent level of knowledge - can determine, for example, that in the last years of the nineteenth century new ways of controlling the use of steam in railway locomotives were an improvement because they were more efficient thermally and permitted higher speeds. Whiggish history conceptualizes technological progress as an asocial, apolitical process, presenting technological knowledge and the technical qualities of artefacts as matters divorced from the rough and tumble, the messy complexity, of everyday existence. In its most extreme form whiggism comprehends artefacts as evolving according to a logic of their own - a 'technical' logic impervious to whatever else is happening in society. To anyone with experience of the disagreements and compromises that make up the real world of engineering this is an extraordinary kind of claim, but the whiggish historian tries to get around this objection by arguing that the social conditions under which something is designed, built or even used have no bearing on its inherent technical characteristics. This erroneous assumption (the point is argued in Chapter 4) is built into the very language of whiggism. While this is bad enough as a narrow account of engineering it has, as we show in the next section, even worse implications when one considers the connotations of social progress often embedded in transport exhibitions. One brief example must serve to illustrate these aspects of whiggish accounts of transport. Whiggish histories of the bicycle trace progress from the early 'boneshaker' (ca. 1860—70) through what is now known as the penny-farthing (ca. 1870—90) and 'safety machines' such as Lawson's bicyclette (1879) and so on up to modern all-terrain bikes and their derivatives. Such an account is historiographically quite untenable, amounting to little more than a projection of a modern conception of what bikes should look like onto societies that had rather different ideas concerning the merits, or otherwise, of particular designs. The point is not that the bike failed to improve technically but that certain critical episodes in its evolution have to be misrepresented if the illusion of a simple, linear story of progress is maintained. Thus for instance the 'penny-farthing', which on a whiggish account is regarded as a rather unsatisfactory design that served merely as a stepping stone to something better, was in fact for 20 years a commercially successful technology. One particular group of users, young men, found the penny-farthing very much to their taste as a vehicle for displaying sporting prowess.58 The written histories associated with some modern transport exhibi63

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tions demonstrate many of the simplistic and celebratory characteristics of whiggism, illustrating the continuing strength of the nineteenth-century tradition of symbolism sketched in Chapter 1. For example, in the introduction to a book accompanying an exhibition on the bicycle mounted in the late 1990s at the London Design Museum, David V Herlihy described the modern bike as 'the triumphant culmination of the age-old quest for a practical, self-acting vehicle', tracing a path of technical improvements to the modern state of 'mechanical perfection' from the French machines of the 1860s.59 Technological whiggism has, of course, far more in common with heritage than with history as these terms were defined in the last chapter. It is orientated primarily towards present purposes, the development of technology being traced in a way that tries to justify that of today and, by implication, that of the future - as David Lowenthal remarks generally of heritage myths, 'faith in past beatitude empowers present authority'.60 The poetics of formalist transport exhibitions can suggest this in several ways, which we now explore. Formalism as technological utopianism Criticisms of the celebratory representation of progress found in technical museums date back to well before the Second World War, and many writers continue to note the intellectual and ideological links between public displays of technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.61 Such comments apply equally to formalist exhibitions of transport. At one level such exhibitions seem simply to deny the original social meaning of objects; the large scale and often immaculately restored nature of vehicles, for example, tends to overwhelm anything other than an immediate emotional reaction - the 'wow' factor. Getting beyond this is not easy for most visitors. Labels rarely mention social context or human purposes, except in the limited ways typical of whiggish histories. Improvements in the technical means (that is, transport) are elevated over consideration of the value or wisdom of the social purposes thus served. But this decontextualization may also sustain a more complex and ideologically loaded reading of exhibitions. Technological progress can connote social improvement and, moreover, do so in a way that suggests the unproblematic, even inevitable nature of both. Indeed, technological progress may inform all kinds of collective identities — such as that of a company or industry, a locality, region or nation, a class or gender, naturalizing and thus tending to render them all immune to critical questioning. This is, as we have said, a very familiar criticism. But transport exhibitors were a long time acknowledging it, and there is evidence that some 64

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ignore it even now. Although it dates from the early 1970s, George Basalla's critique of technological utopianism remains a valuable delineation of the ways in which formalist exhibitions may link technological and social progress.62 Basalla argues that, although exhibitions rarely make such connections explicit, they are strongly suggested by the way the development of modern machinery is depicted in a 'progressive and unilinear evolutionary fashion'. This often fosters 'an outlook that is all the more dangerous to society because it takes the appearance of a truism when in fact it is a highly debatable proposition', namely the assumption that technological progress and social progress is inexorably linked, that a society based on 500-horsepower engines is one inherently better, and its citizens are happier, than one based on 20-horsepower engines. This is a formula that equates cultural superiority and personal satisfaction with the conquest of nature by more and more complex and powerful machines. This formula,'devised by ethnocentric industrial nations who chose to use the machine as their cultural yardstick', means that technical museums are 'purveyors of technological utopianism' - they help to sustain in popular consciousness the idea that contemporary social problems are likely to be solved by more use of machines.63 Technological utopianism may be connoted in one or more of three ways: through displaying artefacts as a technological cornucopia, as aesthetic objects, or as items of romantic, sentimental or humorous interest.64 Common to all is the removal of an object from its original social and physical contexts. Simply placing any artefact in a museum does this, but formalist exhibitions compound the problem by providing little or no interpretation of the many circumstances that originally gave an artefact meaning. Thus displaying machines as aesthetic objects strips away any but those qualities of 'beauty... strength, grace, interrelated complexity, and elegance'. The point is a familiar one, drawing on Walter Benjamin's argument that the aura of exotic objects masks their original meanings from viewers, so that, in Basalla's words,'one's sense of history is overwhelmed by the beauty of the contrivance'.65 Indeed physical restoration to'improve' the appearance of an object plays an important role in divorcing it from its original context - instead of being an object transferred to a museum it becomes a 'museumised' piece.66 Brett makes the point forcibly and historically with particular reference to our concerns through the notion of the technological sublime. By emphasizing in pictures, photographs and displays their 'vast size, repetition, uniformity and apparently superhuman powers', these 'products of human ingenuity and capital' were historically 'endowed with the numinous power of uncontrolled nature'. In the present,

65

Making histories in transport museums displays of the industrial past represent human action-as-technology as mysterious, awesome, and 'made to seem "part of nature" (i.e. beyond question)!67 Displays of technological abundance focus on the apparently everincreasing productive capacity of machines, implying that they are a 'horn of plenty, . . . the engine of the GNP, the producer of consumer goods and services'. But they do not examine the social, environmental or human costs involved in the manufacture and use of these machines and their products, so that the 'source of the manufactured goods, like the source of the bountiful harvest in the ancient cornucopia, is mysterious'.68 The chronological sequence or time line of machines or their products is a particularly telling way in which visual codes and the spatial arrangement of objects combine to suggest this kind of linkage between technological and social 'progress'. It is perhaps particularly effective with regard to transport: after all, what are vehicles if not the embodiment of movement through time as well as space? Finally, presenting machines as objects of picturesque/romantic, sentimental or humorous interest (here we comprehend all three by the term 'nostalgic') may have the effect of simultaneously drawing visitors' attention to the ingenuity of past generations while suggesting that modern technology has fortunately made such ingenuity otiose: progress by any other name.69 All in all, whatever the mix of interpretive techniques used in any particular exhibition, one is left, in Basalla's words, with the 'strong impression that progress in the design of these productive, beautiful, and pleasant machines spells progress for mankind'.70 Formalist technological utopianism at work: the National Railway Museum No one knows what proportion of visitors to transport museums decode formalist displays in the ways Basalla and other critics suggest. As we remarked in Chapter 1, an exhibition's connotations are always far more ambiguous than its denotations. But it is certainly possible to read exhibitions in these ways, as this section demonstrates by examining some of the displays in the NRM. Attention here focuses on the Great (formerly the Main) Hall, the original museum opened in 1975 and re-opened and redisplayed in 1992 after a short period of enforced closure for rebuilding owing to structural failure.71 With certain exceptions, this space has always tended to contain formalist displays of mass, type and thematic kinds. Since 1992 the Hall has largely contained a miscellany of locomotives and other exhibits loosely brought together under the rubric of 'The Technology of Railways'. Other spaces in the museum, principally the Station Hall, deal more explicitly with social history and are examined in Chapter 3. In the Great Hall engineering excellence and aesthetic splendour

66

Figure 2.6 Mallard at the National Railway Museum in 2000. Photo, National Railway Museum.

Making histories in transport museums

combine to celebrate the triumphs of Britain's railways, real or imagined. And since this is the National Railway Museum, it is arguable that the trophies and icons in the Hall also help to sustain a sense of national identity based upon industrial excellence - in Alan Morton's phrase, a 'patriotic view of technology'.72 Take, for example, the treatment the NRM affords Mallard, officially the world's fastest steam locomotive and an extremely popular icon (Figure 2.6). Restored in the 1960s nearly to its record-breaking condition of 1938, the locomotive is undeniably an impressive object: there is more than a hint of the technological sublime in its sheer bulk, streamlined shape and high-quality finish. Indeed the appearance of this beautiful piece of engineering sculpture (the phrase is Dieter Hopkin's) probably makes a more powerful impact and is more important for the production of meaning than the accompanying graphic panels (which make this, strictly speaking, a thematic exhibit). The locomotive's streamlined shape easily triggers thoughts of speed, one aspect of the technologicial cornucopia. Such achievements can readily become tied up in popular imagination with nostalgic 'recollections' of luxurious and prestigious express passenger trains and travel. These perceptions are most likely, in the first instance, to be associated with the locomotive's original owners, the London and North Eastern Railway, whose striking garter-blue livery and insignia are carried by the machine. But most visitors probably also think of the engine and what it stands for as an uniquely British achievement. This is, in any case, a very particular representation of the railways' past. Unless they already know the wider story, visitors are hardly likely to reflect on other possible interpretations of Mallard's achievement. Celebrating the speed record gives no clues, for instance, about the unfavourable business and political circumstances that led the LNER to try for the record in the first place as a publicity stunt. A celebratory reading is easily possible of the rest of the Hall, dominated as it is by engineering sculptures (locomotives, rolling stock and fixed structures such as bridges and signals). With a few exceptions mostly those exhibitions installed or revised since the mid-1990s — artefacts are presented primarily as technological objects, but in ways that may trigger wider associations. There are few obvious sequences of like objects on the main floor of the Hall and no deliberate attempt to mandate any particular order of viewing, so it is fair to say that overall this is a sophisticated form of mass exhibition. Nonetheless it is possible to tell a story of technological progress about the vehicles on display, particularly the locomotives, which represent the successes of British engineering From Rocket to Eurostar, as a photographic essay on the museum aptly puts it.73 A time line of railway track makes this kind of progressivist intention more explicit. Failures have no place in the exhibition.74 68

Figure 2.7 The Main Hall of the National Railway Museum about 1987. Photo, National Railway Museum.

Making histories in transport museums Certain of the earlier displays, in what was then the Main Hall, were in some ways more coherent in their physical arrangement and more explicit in their progressivist thematics. From 1987 to 1990, for example, the Hall was dominated by locomotives arranged around one of two turntables, and by passenger coaches (plus a handful of wagons) around the other (Figure 2.7).75 Both these displays were basically type exhibitions, series of objects suggesting technological progress. The locomotives, for example, were placed more or less chronologically, and although the display of different kinds of engine (express passenger, heavy and light goods, and so on) with their detailed peculiarities of design meant there was no unalloyed demonstration of technical progress, the overall impression was of evolution towards bigger and more powerful motive power - the technological cornucopia again.76 Aesthetics were equally important. Appearances were, and still can be, deceptive (some of the NRM's locomotives have wooden chimneys!) but the restoration during the 1950s and 1960s of original, colourful liveries, highly polished to an exhibition finish, long had important connotations. But one should not assume that these were always progressivist; regressive nostalgia was an equally plausible reading. As Dieter Hopkin points out, the original restorations and the subsequent exhibitions at the NRM arguably had political undertones. Thus the original exhibition in the Main Hall (1975-87) emphasized the so-called 'Golden Age' of Britain's railways, the Edwardian period when fierce inter-company competition for passengers encouraged the manufacture of elegant steam locomotives and substantial carriages all decorated with fine liveries. Such vehicles contrasted markedly with the bland uniformity and corporate identity of the nationalized industry in the 1970s. It is quite possible that to visitors at the time - who had only recently witnessed the demise under British Railways of a heavily rationalized and often filthy and decrepit steam railway, and who were not necessarily benefiting themselves from the modernization of what was left - this display served primarily to 'remind' them of what had been 'lost'.77 Visitors and technological utopianism As this chapter has shown, there is a semiotics even to formalist exhibitions of transport. Object-centred, minimally interpreted displays can, by drawing on deep-set cultural assumptions in the popular consciousness, suggest or connote wider social meanings. Even when formalism employs the language of the mass exhibition, visitors may 'read' displays in the light of the visual and other codes they bring to the museum. The celebratory categories of technological utopianism - cornucopia, aesthetic appreciation and nostalgia - arguably still inform many transport 70

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exhibitions today as they have done in the past. But exactly which messages modern visitors take away is a matter for urgent empirical inquiry. As we have already suggested with regard to the NRM, popular consciousness changes with social circumstances and affects the ways museum exhibitions are understood. Transport displays are not necessarily 'read' by visitors in the early twenty-first century in the ways they were when set up, perhaps several decades ago. George Basalla and Michael Ettema may be right and, once stripped of the moral and social imperatives of nineteenth- and twentieth-century bourgeois culture, the story told in museums is chiefly that of material progress.78 Perhaps too, as Bernard Finn argues, the link between technological and social progress is set so deeply in the popular mind-set that visitors are still inclined to make the connection even in the face of explicit interpretations to the contrary.79 There are reasons, however, to believe otherwise. The symbolic power of technology is arguably weaker than it was, partly because certain technologies have patently failed to deliver the social benefits that were promised. Some societies are beginning to question, for instance, the balance of costs and benefits to be had from the rapid growth of motorized road transport. On the other hand, this kind of debate has scarcely started in the realm of air transport — we all want our cheap holidays in the sun it seems - and few transport museums face up to the challenge of how to interpret the past in ways that do not tend to assume that more technology is automatically beneficial. Technological nostalgia is a particularly interesting category. Do some visitors, as Basalla suggests, invoke it as a way of emphasizing the distance that has been travelled, the progress that has been achieved, or do they wallow in it as a way of expressing their dissatisfaction with modern life? The appeal of heritage is, in David Lowenthal's estimation, nurtured by a technophobia in which 'an idealized past replaces a discredited future'.80 The surveys of popular attitudes to the past mentioned in Chapter 1 suggest there are no straightforward answers, that, in Nick Merriman's words, people 'use the past in multifarious ways to suit their own particular needs and feelings about the [modern] world'.81 These uses are not necessarily to the taste of those exhibitors who see museums as places of learning and social criticism. By contrast, as Clay McShane remarks in relation to car museums, for many visitors vehicles are primarily cultural icons, so that 'to the devotee . . . the point of the museum is ritual, not intellectual'.82 But it is under precisely these conditions that exhibitions are potentially at their most coercive and socially regressive. And since - however much they might think otherwise - exhibitors have a good deal more time than visitors to reflect on the significance of objects, they have a 71

Making histories in transport museums

responsibility to offer the public the opportunity of engaging with the historical complexities obscured by iconographic displays of the kind found in the NRM's Great Hall. Whether visitors accept the invitation is up to them. One step towards encouraging them to do so would be to find out more about how and why visitors do or do not engage with even the most formalist of transport displays, and what they take from the experience.

Notes 1. Ivan Karp,'Culture and representation', in Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (eds), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and the Politics of Museum Display, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC, 1991, 11-24, at 12-13. 2. Kevin Moore, Museums and Popular Culture, Leicester University Press, London, 1997, 24-8, 32-51; Mark Suggitt, 'The social history approach', in David Fleming, Crispin Paine and John Rhodes (eds), Social History in Museums: A Handbook for Professionals', HMSO, London, 1993, 28—33; Gaynor Kavanagh, History Curatorship, Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1990, 53-114, esp. 57. 3. Ludmilla Jordanova, 'Objects of knowledge: a historical perspective on museums', in Peter Vergo (ed.), The New Museology, Reaktion Books, London, 1989, 22-40, at 32-40; Jette Sandahl, 'Gender perspectives in transport and communication museums', Transport Museums, 22 (1995), 9—23; Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Man: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1989; Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 1999, esp. 10-50, 182-90. 4. Susan M. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections: A. Cultural Study, Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1992, 1-11, 86. See also her On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the EuropeanTradition, Routledge, London, 1995. 5. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections, 118-22, 136-43; Mieke Bal, 'Telling objects: a narrative perspective on collecting', in John Eisner and Roger Cardinal (eds), The Cultures of Collecting, Reaktion Books, London, 1994, 97115; Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, Routledge, London, 1992,179-80,192-6. 6. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections, 120-2. 7. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, Routledge, London, 1995, 35. 8. Michael J. Ettema, 'History museums and the culture of materialism', in Jo Blatti (ed.), Past Meets Present: Essays about Historic Interpretation and Public Audiences, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC, 1987, 62-85, at 63^74. 9. Henrietta Lidchi, 'The poetics and politics of exhibiting other cultures', in 72

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10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, Sage, London, 1997,151-208, at 160. Lidchi,'Poetics', 167, quoting M. M. Ames and Mary Douglas. See also, for example, Hooper-Greenhill, Shaping of Knowledge, 191-7. Ettema, 'History museums', 63. Ettema, 'History museums', 66. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections, 86-7, 109-13, and On Collecting, 299; Hooper-Greenhill, Shaping of Knowledge, 197-8; Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 75-9. Ian Hodder, Foreword to Michael Shanks and Christopher Til ley, Reconstructing Archaeology: theory and Practice, Routledge, London, 2nd edn, 1992, xv; Kenneth Hudson, Museums of Influence, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, 88-112; Stella V F. Butler, Science and Technology Museums, Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1992, 26-37, 43-57. Marjorie Akin,'Passionate possession: the formation of private collections', in W. David Kingery (ed.), Learning from Things: Method and Theory of Material Culture Studies, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC, 1996,102—28; Pearce, On Collecting, 3-35; Introduction to Eisner and Cardinal (eds), Cultures of Collecting, 1—6. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections, 36-88, quote at 84; Hooper-Greenhill, Shaping of Knowledge, 185-6. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections, 73—84, quote at 81. E. A. Forward, Handbook of the Collections Illustrating Land Transport, vol. 3, part 2, Railway Locomotives and Rolling Stock: Descriptive Catalogue, HMSO, London, 1931, esp. 28. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections, 84-8, 120-2. John V Pickstone, 'Bodies, fields and factories: technologies and understandings in the age of revolutions' in Robert Fox (ed.), Technological Change: Methods and Themes in the History of Technology, Harwood Academic, Amsterdam, 1996, 51-61, esp. 54-60; 'Museological science? the place of the analytical/comparative in nineteenth-century science, technology and medicine', History of Science, 32 (1994), 111-38, esp. 116-31; and, 'Ways of knowing: towards a historical sociology of science, technology and medicine', British journal for the History of Science, 26 (1993), 433-58, esp. 442-52. Butler, Science Museums, 15-57; R. G. W. Anderson, 'What is technology? education through museums in the mid-nineteeth century' British journal for the History of Science, 25 (1992), 169-84; Sophie Forgan,'The architecture of display: museums, universities and objects in nineteenth-century Britain', History of Science, 32 (1994), 139-62; Colin Divall, A measure of agreement: employers and engineering science in the universities of England and Wales, 1897-1939', Social Studies of Science, 20 (1990), 65^112; Svante Lindqvist, An Olympic stadium of technology: Deutsches Museum and Sweden'sTekniska Museet', in Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus (ed.), Industrial Society and Its Museums 73

Making histories in transport museums

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

1890-1900: Social Aspirations and Cultural Politics, Harwood Academic, Reading, 1992, 37-54, at 43-5; Hudson, Museums of Influence, 88-112. Kg. Max-Gerrit von Pein, 'The Mercedes-Benz Museum and its visitors', Transport Museums, 15/16 (1988/89), 66-9; William Bridges Adams, English Pleasure Carriages, Adams and Dart, Bath, 1971 (1st edn, 1837), esp. 220-45. John H. White, 'The railway museum: past, present, and future', Technology and Culture, 14 (1973), 599-613, at 602-3; Dieter Hopkin, 'Railway preservation in the 1920s and 1930s', in Neil Cossons, Allan Patmore and Rob Shorland-Ball (eds), Perspectives on Railway History and Interpretation, National Railway Museum, York, 1992, 88-99, at 94, 96. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections, 129-31, quotes at 130-1. Pickstone, 'Museological science', 130-1; Pearce, On Collecting, 232-4. Andrew D. Young, Trolley to the Past: A Brief History and Companion to the Operating Trolley Museums of North America, Interurban Press, Glendale CA, 1983, 37-9. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections, 87; Forgan, Architecture', 149-51, 160 fn 58. Thomas J. Schlereth, 'History museums and material culture', in Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig (eds), History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1989, 295-320. Rob Pilgrim, 'The Amuseum: the motor museum, the millennium and popular culture', Transport Museums, 24 (1998) 42-7, at 43. White,'Railway museum', 605. Young, Trolley to the Past, 37-9; Ian Yearsley, Tramway Adventure: A Celebration of Tramcar Preservation, 1948-1998, Tramway Museum Society, Crich, 1998, 2-27. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections, 73—84, quote at 81. Rail, no. 330 (6 May 1998), 69. Kenneth Hudson, 'The ticket and the train', Transport Museums, 21 (1994), 9-14, at 11. Kavanagh, History Curatorship, 132—5; David Lowenthal, The Past Is a foreign Country, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985, 238-49, quote at 238. Kavanagh, History Curatorship, 132-3. Kavanagh, History Curatorship, 133. Peter Williams, Britain's Railway Museums, Ian Allan, London, 1974, 9-36; Handel Kardas, 'Museums, visitors - and what they expect', in Cossons, Patmore and Shorland-Ball (eds), Perspectives on Railway History, 136-45, at 139. Naoya Hioki, 'The new Toyota Automobile Museum, Japan: an overview', Transport Museums, 17 (1990), 81-8. Rudi Volti, 'The Petersen Automotive Museum', Technology and Culture, 36, 1995, 646-650, quote at 647. Jean-Claude Delerm, The National Automobile Museum Mulhouse: Schlumpf Collection, Fondation Paribas, Paris, 1997. Rudi Volti, 'The National Motorcycle Museum, Birmingham, England', Technology and Culture, 28 (1987), 96-8. 74

Trains, planes, cars and boats 41. John H. White,'The Baltimore and Ohio Transportation Museum', Technology and Culture, 11 (1970), 70-84, quote at 82. 42. Jean Renaud, Musee Fran^ais du Chemin de Per, Mulhouse, MFCF, Mulhouse, 1993. 43. Bernard S. Finn, 'Exhibit reviews: twenty years after', Technology and Culture, 30 (1989), 993-1003, at 994. 44. Robert C. Mikesh, 'Preserving unsheltered exhibit aircraft', Transport Museums, 15/16 (1988/89), 45-56, at 54. 45. Lidchi, 'Poetics', 166-84, quotes at 166-7. 46. Lidchi,'Poetics', 166-84. 47. David Brett, The Construction of Heritage, Cork University Press, Cork, 1996, 6-8; 38-93. See also editors' introduction to Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe (eds), Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World, Blackwell/Sociological Review, Oxford, 1996, 1-18, at 5-6; Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 11, 24, 33-47; Carla Yanni, Natures Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display, Athlone Press, London, 1999. 48. Brett, Construction of Heritage, 6-8, 61-2, 69, quotes at 7, 61, 69 (original emphasis suppressed). 49. Brett, Construction of Heritage, 6—7, 38. 50. Brett, Construction of Heritage, 7, 38-86. On the technological sublime, see e.g., William Irwin, The New Niagara: Tourism, Technology and the Landscape of Niagara Tails 1776-1917, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park PA, 1996; David Nye, American Technological Sublime, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1994; Julie Wosk, breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick NJ, 1992. 51. Brett, Construction of Heritage, 75—87; Umberto Eco, trans. William Weaver, Travels in Hyper-reality, Picador, London, 1986, 3-58; Kevin Walsh, The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Post-Modern World, Routledge, London, 1992, 56-7, 109-11; Lidchi, 'Poetics and polities', 174; Jordanova,'Objects of knowledge', 33—8. 52. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections, 207—8. 53. Lidchi, 'Poetics and polities', 173. 54. Jordanova,'Objects of knowledge', 33-5. 55. Brett, Construction of Heritage, 88. 56. Brett, Construction of Heritage, 7-8, 88-93. 57. Internalist history is not all bad; it has the advantage of revealing the workings of what might otherwise remain the 'black box' of technology. And it is surely the case, as Bernard Finn argues, that presenting visitors with the real thing (or a good model of it) is one of the best ways of helping them to understand machines. Finn, 'Exhibit reviews', 999. 58. Wiebe Bijker and Trevor Pinch,'The social construction of facts and artefacts: or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other', in W E. Bijker, T P. Hughes and T. Pinch (eds), The Social 75

Making histories in transport museums

59.

60. 61.

62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

Construction of Technological Systems, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1987,17-50; Paul Rosen, 'The social construction of mountain bikes: technology and postmodernity in the cycle industry', Social Studies of Science, 23 (1993), 479-513. David V Herlihy, Introduction to Pryor Dodge, The Bicycle, Flammarion, Paris, 1996, 6-9. See also for example S. O'Kane and A. Anderson, The Design Story of the Bicycle, Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, Cultra, n.d. David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, Viking, London, 1997, 99. E.g., Eugene Ferguson,'Technical museums and international exhibitions', Technology and Culture, 6 (1965), 30-46; George Basalla, 'Museums and technological utopianism', in Ian M. G. Quimby and Polly Anne Earl (eds), Technological Innovation and the Decorative Arts, Winterthur Conference Report, Charlottesville VA, 1973, 355-73; Michael McMahon, 'The romance of technological progress: a critical review of the National Air and Space Museum', Technology and Culture, 22 (1981), 281-96; Joseph J. Corn, 'Tools, technologies, and contexts: interpreting the history of American technics', in Leon and Rosenzweig (eds), History Museums in the United States, 237-61; Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 77; Lindqvist, 'Olympic stadium' 37-54; John M. Staudenmaier, 'Clean exhibits, messy exhibits: Henry Ford's technological aesthetic', in Schroeder-Gudehus (ed.), Industrial Society, 55-65. Basalla's categories parallel those found elsewhere in the long tradition of formalist interpretation in history museums; see, for example, Michael Ettema's analysis in terms of 'aesthetics'/individualism', and 'technological progress', each of which employs a technological dimension. Ettema, 'History museums', 67-70. Basalla, 'Technological utopianism' 357-8, 364. Ibid. Karp, 'Culture and representation', 16. See also for example, Walsh, Representation of the Past, 35-6. Basalla, 'Technological utopianism', 362. We owe this to Dieter Hopkin. Brett, Construction of Heritage, 51-60, quotes at 51, 59-60. Basalla, 'Technological utopianism', 360. Ibid., 363. Ibid., 364. The Great Hall is little more than a modern warehouse whereas the Main Hall was once a locomotive shed, rebuilt in the 1950s on the site of a nineteenth-century predecessor. Most informed observers judged that the Main Hall enhanced visitors' appreciation of the displays of vehicles, particularly engines. Neil Cossons, 'The National Railway Museum, York', and Handel Kardas,'Museum visitors - and what they expect', both in Cossons, Patmore and Shorland-Ball (eds), Perspectives on Railway History, 129-35, 136— 45. But cf. Rob Shorland-Ball,' "All Change": new buildings and displays at the National Railway Museum, 1988-1992', in Cossons, Patmore and 76

Trains, planes, cars and boats Shorland-Ball (eds), Perspectives on Railway History, 146-58, at 154. 72. Alan Morton, 'Tomorrow's yesterdays: science museums and the future', in Robert Lumley (ed.), The Museum Time-Machine: Putting Cultures on Display, Comedia, London, 1988,128-43, at 132. 73. John Coiley, From Rocket to Eurostar: The National Railway Museum in Camera, Atlantic Transport Publishers, Penryn, 1996. 74. It is noteworthy, for instance, that the NRM's chief exemplar of a failed technology, the Advanced Passenger Train, has been in store since shortly after it became clear in the mid-1980s that the project was not going to succeed. 75. Dieter Hopkin, A commentary on restoration, conservation and the National Railway Museum collection', in Rob Shorland-Ball (ed.), Common Roots - Separate Branches: Railway History and Preservation, Science Museum/ National Railway Museum, York, 1994, 215-21. 76. See, for example, Coiley, Rocket to Eurostar; Kardas,'Museums, visitors', 141. 77. Hopkin, 'Commentary on restoration', 215—21; Cossons, 'National Railway Museum', 132-4; Jack Simmons, Dandy-Cart to Diesel: The National Railway Museum, HMSO, London, 1981, 7-34. 78. Ettema, 'History museums', 70-72. 79. Finn, 'Exhibit reviews', 997. 80. Lowenthal, Heritage Crusade, 10; Nick Merriman, Beyond the Glass Case: The Pas^ the Heritage and the Public in Britain, Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1991, 34-9. 81. Merriman, Glass Case, 37. 82. Clay McShane, 'Exhibit review of the Museo Dell Automobile Carlo Biscaretti Di Ruffia', Radical Historical Review, 551 (1991), 107-13.

77

3

Travels in the past: exhibiting social histories of transport 'The histories of the museum successes and failures demonstrate that the use of knowledge is contingent upon other power practices.' Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (Routledge, London, 1992), 193

By the late 1990s few transport museums that hoped to interest the general public could ignore 'social history! Social history in museums is, as Gaynor Kavanagh remarks, a curious affair, sometimes understood in an academic sense to refer to the social structures, processes and contradictions of the past, but more commonly referring to all aspects of past experience that are not obviously technological, or perhaps additionally economic, in nature.1 Here the term is taken in this looser sense, embracing anything to do with the social, economic, cultural, political, business, labour and environmental aspects of transport in the past. Creating exhibitions on these lines ought to encourage exhibitors to think more deeply about the meanings they want to communicate. %t in practice such reflection is often not very deep. Even social history exhibitions rarely offer visitors the cognitive and other resources needed to engage critically with the myths of collective memory Exhibitions with a social historical theme are not new. In the 1950s the British Transport Commission mounted a series of temporary displays at Euston Station, some of which tried to place transport in a social context. 'London on Wheels' (1953), for instance, told the story of travel in the city in the nineteenth century. Yet in Britain the shift to highly interpreted displays of social history only began in the 1970s. In the mid-1960s the Science Museum opened its Land Transport gallery, unashamedly of the old school. But by 1972 the National Tramway Museum offered visitors some sense of the social aspects of transport, mounting a temporary exhibition on the involvement of royalty at tramway openings and other special occasions. This was then developed into a display of graphic panels, videos and small objects detailing the politics of the rise and fall of tramways, and the kinds of journey ordinary people made by tram. Similarly, from its opening in 1975 the National Railway Museum (NRM) drew some attention to the social and economic effects of Britain's railways through displays in its Balcony Gallery of small objects, manuscripts of early railway engineers, their equipment, railway company seals, timetables, maps, and early trades union material.2 78

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The pace of change quickened in the 1980s. From its opening at the beginning of the decade the London Transport Museum used graphic panels around the walls of the building to draw out the role of urban transport in shaping the physical form of and life in the metropolis. No attempt was made to provide a context of display for the vehicles in the centre of the floor. But other transport museums increasingly employed more sophisticated exhibitionary techniques long familiar in other types of museum, such as dioramas and other forms of simulation. One of the earliest examples was at the National Motor Museum which in the mid1980s opened 'Wheels' a mechanical ride past a chronological series of dioramas illustrating the changing uses made of cars. From its inception in the late 1980s the National Waterways Museum, Gloucester, integrated objects, graphic panels, texts, videos and sound tapes to present an account of how social, economic, business and political conditions informed the promotion, building, development, working and decline of Britain's canals and navigable rivers. The museum was unusual at the time for the emphasis it gave to the working and living conditions of those employed in the industry.3 The NRM took heavily contextualist techniques to one extreme when in 1990 it opened 'The Great Railway Show', an entire hall of vehicles and other objects dedicated to illustrating the social impact of railways through the carriage of passengers and goods. Such was the exhibition's novelty and success that it won the Museum of the Ysar Award.4 Even the smallest museums rose to the challenge in the 1990s. The Vintage Carriages Trust at Ingrow in West Yorkshire used cheaply produced sound and visual clues to contextualize its collection of historical railway coaches, and more than one motor museum attempted, if not to link cars to their users, to recreate the local garage. The heavily contextualized approach reliant on dioramas was perhaps taken to its extreme at the National Fishing Heritage Centre ('Codvik') at Grimsby, where in a directed tour visitors move through a series of recreated spaces where even temperature is firmly under the control of the interpreter. Transport museums in the USA started to attend to social history at about the same time as those in Britain. The California State Railroad Museum, for example, concentrated on presenting the social development of western railroading, largely through full-sized dioramas, when it opened in 1981. And again, the 1990s witnessed something close to an explosion of interest in social history. One west coast institution, the Petersen Automotive Museum, gave over its entire ground floor to an exploration of the role of the car in the history and urban morphology of southern California. Some established museums, such as the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore, added social history galleries of graphic panels and cabinets of small objects, while others, such as the Railroad 79

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Museum of Pennsylvania, contextualized vehicles by redisplaying them in diorama settings. Yet other museums started to present the past from the point of view of previously ignored or marginalized social groups. For example, the New York Transit Museum's award-winning exhibition 'Steel, Stone and Backbone: Building New York's Subways 1900-1925' focused on the labourers who built the tunnels, their working conditions, construction methods and tools. The Railroaders Memorial Museum in Altoona, Pennsylvania, entirely redisplayed in 1998, looks at railroading in the city and the region firmly from the perspective of railroad workers and their families. Consumers or users of transport increasingly have a presence. They will be included, for example, in the Smithsonian's replacement for its very traditional Land Transportation Gallery; the new display is planned to treat mobility as a cultural phenomenon.5 Social history of one sort or another also spread across continental Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. Berlin Museum fur Verkehr und Technik (Berlin Museum of Transport and Technology), the first stage of which opened in 1983, set out to 'demonstrate the interdependencies between railways and society'.6 Even that French temple to formalism, the Musee National de 1'Automobile in Mulhouse, gestured towards the social history of motoring through the use of mannequins and dioramas, while during the 1990s the Musee Frangais du Chemin de Fer added an orientation gallery that included aspects of social history. Later in the decade the longestablished Verkehrshaus der Schweiz (Swiss Museum of Transport and Communication) in Lucerne opened a permanent display on trans-Alpine railways; this exhibition, discussed in more depth later in this chapter (pp. 100-1), treated social historical themes with a degree of awareness and sophistication that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier. The timing and the growing strength of this trend is consistent with the pattern that David Lowenthal detects in the more general enlargement of the sphere of heritage since the Second World War. Whereas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the focus was on the material and the tangible - 'monuments and memorials' - the concern is now more for the intangible, 'images and ideas'.7 Various factors contributed to the growing interest in social history in the generality of museums from the late 1960s, and help to explain its rather slower acceptance in transport museums. The growth of radical grassroots political movements in many capitalist countries was paralleled by the evolution of more critical schools of thought in the humanities and social sciences. Together these produced a new generation of academically trained museum workers, dedicated not just to the public display of social history but to the idea of museums as agents of social change. These professionals thought that exhibitions should deal with historical themes of contemporary relevance, treating them from a critical perspective grounded in scholarly research and 80

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intended to shift public attitudes. In the USA, the funding requirements of the National Endowment for the Humanities encouraged closer connections during the 1970s between academic historians and history curators, further strengthening moves towards explicit interpretation. Even some industrial and technical museums were influenced by these trends in the 1970s and 1980s.8 On the whole, however, transport museums (at least outside the communist bloc) followed some way behind other sorts of museums in dealing with social context, a sign perhaps of transport exhibitors' professional and intellectual isolation. The vigorous debates engendered by the 'new muscology' in the late 1980s, issues such as the ideological roles of museums and the kinds of history that it might be appropriate to exhibit, only began to impinge upon transport museums some five or more years later.9 There were several reasons for this, although national differences make it dangerous to generalize. Transport was not a central concern of the more politically active museum workers. And although transport history came academically of age in the 1960s, it was neither as popular with students nor as politically radical as the 'new social history' or 'history from below', with its emphasis on previously marginalized groups. Moreover, with their strong roots in the voluntary sector, few transport museums in the English-speaking world employed history graduates as exhibitors until the late 1980s. In the USA federal funding of the kind that encouraged connections between universities, museums and historic sites largely passed by the world of transport. For example, what is now the Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton, Pennsylvania (originally a privately owned museum) became federally funded only in 1986 - although once funding was secured, the museum's first five year development plan laid great emphasis on interpreting the social, economic, environmental, industrial and political impact of steam railroading in the northeastern USA.10 Transport museums largely turned to social history for a pressing practical reason: to stem the loss of visitors. The NRM, for example, first planned a greater emphasis on social history in the mid-1980s when visitor figures started to decline about a decade after the museum's opening and almost 20 years since the disappearance of the steam railway that the museum celebrated. The museum assumed — with some justification — that displays concentrating on historical themes familiar in some measure from everyday life would prove more popular than its formalist displays. By contrast, museums which pay little attention to social history tend to be those that can still trade on visitors' personal memories. It is quite striking that many car museums generally give less prominence to social history than their equivalents in, say, the railway or inland waterway sectors. Cars have been the principal form of mechanized inland transport 81

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for at least two generations, so even people who do not have a strong interest in them can derive much pleasure from seeing the vehicles of their youth. But even so motor museums are having to face the fact that in the near future this might not be enough.11 This pragmatic drift to social history has had unfortunate results in one respect: the explicit themes and connotations of many transport exhibitions tend to reproduce dominant, and often ideologically regressive, views about the past. Many exhibitors treat social history in a superficial and timid way, rarely bothering (whether because of inclination or a lack of knowledge, training or time) to examine their own preconceptions about the past. As Steven Lavine remarks in a different context, their 'habitual practices . . . reflect historical myths they would sometimes like to share' with visitors.12 Thus interpretation often does little more than point out banally that transport served social and economic purposes. While this is better than nothing, what is often lacking is the mission to explain that is central to Michael Ettema's category of analytical exhibitions — the attempt 'to teach not just what happened but how and why it happened!13 Part of the purpose of this chapter is therefore to explore what transport exhibitors might yet learn from other kinds of museum about the treatment of social context. A word of caution is appropriate, however. A critique of transport exhibitions based solely on their lack of conformity to the analyst model is not necessarily going to result in better and more engaging displays, even if exhibitors are willing to listen. A display full of authoritative explanations that engages none but the tiniest minority of visitors is not good public history. The problem stems from the mismatch between the analytical model's understanding of 'history'and the ways in which the public appears to relate to the past. Analytical exhibitions assume an academic understanding of the nature and purpose of historical inquiry, one that sees the historian as someone who, in E. H. Carr's words, 'continuously asks the question "Why?" '.14 Analyst displays try to provide some sort of answer to such questions; they emphasize 'abstract explanations for the concrete events of history' setting objects 'in a context of ideas, values, and other social circumstances of their time' in such a way as to 'stimulate questioning about historical processes and help communicate relevant abstractions'.15 Good public history must offer this as a possibility, at least some of the time; as the museum educationalists John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking acknowledge, museums do 'need strategies for presentation that will ensure clear and unambiguous concept learning'.16 But as we remarked in Chapter 1, these strategies must recognize that most people learn best about the past when they can relate abstract ideas to objects and memories. This and the next chapter explore some of the ways this might be achieved. 82

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Displaying the social history of transport: the Station Hall at the National Railway Museum There are several lessons that transport museums should take from experience in the best of other museums.17 In the first place, they need to think much more deeply and critically about the kinds of history it is appropriate to make through the medium of an exhibition. The challenge relates both to the 'message' and to the way in which it is 'communicated', although in practice it is not easy to separate the two. As we have just remarked, most transport exhibitions are culturally conservative — they tend to reproduce rather than question myths about transport, its social organization and effects. Certain narratives are selected for display, while others are suppressed or ignored. There is, moreover, a pattern to these choices. Most transport exhibitions draw upon a repertoire of socially dominant myths; the ways they represent the past tend to be ideologically conservative. This is all quite straightforward to establish, and we turn to the task shortly. The wider consequences of this cultural and ideological conservatism are, of course, much more difficult to ascertain because it involves the 'more variable and evasive process whereby people consent or acquiesce to these representations'.18 Until extensive research is carried out into this problem it would seem wise for exhibitors to exercise a precautionary principle, to assume that for the reasons outlined in Chapter 2 the growing use of the conventions of simulation has enhanced the conservative potential of transport displays. Of course, visitors who come with the necessary knowledge and motivation can 'read against the grain' of an exhibition, rejecting its explicit messages and connotations. But such dissident readings, we suspect, will always be in a minority. These points are perhaps best illustrated in relation to national museums. In Chapter 1 we linked the emergence in the nineteenth century of certain kinds of transport display with the evolution of museums as sites of national identity, and in Chapter 2 we showed how elements of this tradition continued to inform exhibitions well into the 1970s and beyond. In attempting to define the population of a nation-state as citizens bound together in a single 'imagined community', museums traded on a very particular kind of narrative. Nationhood was represented as something shared in common by all classes and groups in society. But a moment's reflection on the histories of conflict endemic to most societies suggests that displays of national unity and harmony were, at the very least, only telling part of the story19 This, we now argue, is particularly true of social history exhibitions in national transport museums. More particularly, to paraphrase David Brett, the past in these is prefigured to provide an uncontroversial reading in which 'irreconcilable oppositions have been harmonised'.20 83

Making histories in transport museums

Our example is the Station Hall at the NRM, a development of the award-winning 'The Great Railway Show! This is an exhibition of some sophistication, employing in the main conventions of simulation and graphic panels to introduce, at the most obvious level of interpretation, social and economic themes relating to Britain's railways. The Hall focuses principally on the transport of passengers and goods, and their social effects, although some attention is paid to the organization of railway work. There is also an important display on the monarchy and railways, to which we return in more detail later (pp. 87-90). These interpretive techniques stand in contrast to the formalist displays dominating the older exhibition space, the Great Hall. For one thing the building itself employs the conventions of (chiefly visual) simulative realism; the Station Hall is mostly nineteenth-century in origin and has impeccable railway credentials. Once York's Goods Station, it was refurbished in 1990 to suggest a passenger terminus during the 'Golden Age' of the steam era (roughly, 1870—1914). Inside the building are heavily restored locomotives, passenger coaches and goods wagons arranged into several 'trains'; in fact these only hint at historic formations since for one thing they are too short. Visitors are free to wander along railway platforms (slightly modified versions from those originally used for sorting goods), along the outside of the trains (Figure 3.1). They can also examine the vehicles' interiors from outside, and they may also enter several freight vehicles and one passenger coach. Inside some of the other coaches are mannequins dressed as passengers in period costumes. In the late 1990s the museum added a guard and a lad, new to the job, inside a brake van (a specialist vehicle attached to the rear of all goods trains). This pair appears to engage in a short conversation about working goods trains. And although the smell of the steam railway is conspicuous by its absence, appropriate noises are played intermittently over the Hall's public address system. In essence the Hall is a large diorama though which visitors may move at will. The vehicles and other objects are presented in context as symbols of the social and economic purposes they served — a good example of Susan Pearce's resurrection of the body of the past. However the Station Hall moves beyond thematic formalism. There are also many large graphic panels, set back from the 'trains' to minimize visual intrusion, and many smaller supplementary ones. These serve several purposes. Some deal with themes which are not well represented by the objects on display. Thus one series (now gone) looked at various aspects of railway work, while its replacement examines the role of women within the railways' workforce. Other panels introduce broad themes relating in a general way to the displayed objects, such as 'Carrying the Freight - from Eggs to Elephants' or 'Railway Shipping'. Yet others develop these themes by telling visitors more about the services provided by the trains in front of 84

Figure 3.1 The Station Hall of the National Railway Museum in 2000. Photo, National Railway Museum.

Making histories in transport museums

them - 'Express Train' 'Boat Train' etc. There are also film 'shorts' transferred to video, mostly made by the railways in the 1950s and 1960s in the interest of public relations. These cover some of the railways' general and specialist services. One, for instance, looks at the economic importance of the summer haulage of fresh fruit and vegetables from the south west of England, and the operating difficulties this caused. Another extols the virtues of the continental links provided by train ferries, a form of transport now made redundant by the Channel Tunnel. Thus although the greater part of the Hall lacks, in David Brett's sense, a directed narrative, it is what Goran Carlsson and Per-Uno call a narrative exhibition - one relying on diverse forms of interpretation to 'communicate a point of view or to narrate an experience'.21 This atmospheric ensemble is undeniably popular with visitors, probably more so than the Great Hall, and in part this is because of the much greater sense of social context.22 Yet for all this it is hard to resist the conclusion that ultimately the exhibition fails to move beyond the celebratory connotations outlined in Chapter 2. Indeed elements of technological utopianism remain. Vehicles and building alike are offered as aesthetic objects, although now one is invited to marvel at the ensemble as well as the individual pieces. And while there is less of the emphasis on technological progress found in the Great Hall — no time lines, for instance - a strong sense of nostalgia permeates the whole display. Since with the exception of the exhibition on royal trains no particular narrative structure is intended, the passage of time is, as it were, frozen. The overall effect of the exhibition is to elide any sense of change in the past, to reduce the tangled, complex history of Britain's railways and the society they served to an undifferentiated and aestheticized 'past'. This is the railway as romance. It is also a harmonious, untroubled past. The Station Hall trades on the same kinds of myths about the railways' history and of the society of which they were a part as those found elsewhere in the NRM. The explicit interpretation and, just as importantly, what it omits to say together produce an impression of Britain's railways as a stable, successful industry, faithfully serving all manner of social and economic needs. In short, the Station Hall trades on regressive myths of a 'Golden Age', shorn of encounters with problems like over-bearing management or poor service. A visitor would be hard-pressed to discover, for example, that for much of the last third of the nineteenth century Britain's railway companies were highly unpopular with large sections of the population - for instance traders, who thought they were being overcharged. Nor is there any mention of the increasingly fraught relationship between the companies and government, as the latter tried, with mixed success, to regulate freight charges and to impose a more stringent safety regime for passenger trains. 86

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Missing too is any opportunity to learn about the gradual replacement of one form of managerial control of labour, a kind of industrial paternalism, with another based on more bureaucratic kinds of discipline and the concomitant rise of trades unionism.23 The Station Hall is a good example of what George Hein calls a didactic, expository exhibition, presenting as given fact a view of events which was contested at the time and is so today.24 Indeed the Hall's approach to interpretation - the attempts at simulation using 'authentic' objects combined with the factual style of the textual, graphic and photographic interpretation - means that for many people the exhibition is probably, in Ludmilla Jordanova's sense, coercive. It trades on deep-seated cultural assumptions to reflect back at visitors a particular mythical representation of the past, almost without their being aware of the fact. Thus one group of critics argues that the Hall's emphasis on an aesthetic of objects produces an affective, nostalgic response 'akin to a gestalt effect', creating 'not a representation of the elements of the material culture of the past demanding a thoughtful engagement, but a recreation of the past itself, static and visitable, the spirit of which visitors are invited to partake'.25 If visitors read against this grain, they do so only because they come to the museum with the knowledge and motivation to succeed. In fairness, some additions to the Station Hall in the late 1990s did suggest the complex and contested nature of historical change on the railways, and offered some explanations for what happened. The graphic panels on women's role in the railway industry discuss, for example, the reasons why women who had performed more than adequately in their jobs during two world wars were forced out of the industry when peace returned. Similarly, the goods guard and his lad introduce a cautionary note about the kind of dangerous working conditions typical of the 'Golden Age'. But these, unfortunately, are no more than a discordant coda to the symphony playing throughout the rest of the Hall. Myths about the harmonious relationship between the railway companies, their workers and customers mirror other, more general if less explicit ones about social and political harmony at the national level. Railway trains, skilfully built, and beautifully finished and presented, celebrate past industrial triumphs and thus contribute to the formation and reproduction of a very particular sense of national identity in the present.26 The exhibition of royal trains,'Palaces on Wheels', shows this aspect of the Station Hall at its most extreme (Figure 3.2). The display is the most recent in a celebratory series which has its origins in a temporary exhibition mounted by the British Transport Commission in the early 1950s.27 The NRM display is a striking and important one, taking perhaps a little under a quarter of the floor area of the Hall. It is also a rare example of an 87

Figure 3.2 'Palaces on Wheels', the royal trains exhibition at the National Railway Museum, 2000. Photo, National Railway Museum.

[exhibiting social histories of transport

exhibition in the museum with a directed narrative. Visitors are encouraged to enter the exhibition at one end, pass by a set of graphic panels setting out a historical background to royalty's use of railways and the difficulties this caused the operating authorities, and then inspect the oldest of several royal carriages. A video sketches the evolution of royal travel by train throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Visitors then pass on to contemplate the rest of the royal coaches in chronological order, gaining, one hopes, some sense of historical change. Attention to visual and aural detail effectively enhances the exhibition's appeal. A red carpet running throughout the exhibition, a mock triumphal arch and a sound loop of cheering crowds suggest the spirit of a royal visit. Thoughtfully positioned lighting highlights the superb workmanship and luxurious appointments of the carriages, and sound cones, activated when visitors step within their circumference, give potted accounts of each vehicle's history and use. These are reinforced by graphic labels. It is not hard to read 'Palaces on Wheels' as an exhibition defining a nation with a long history of stability and prosperity grounded in constitutional monarchy and industrial achievement. More specifically, the royal trains are chiefly displayed, both by commission and omission, as symbols of a monarchy that was always -- and still is - unproblematic and permanent, ^fet in fact the monarchy as an institution was deeply unpopular for much of the earlier part of the nineteenth century. Winning longterm public support for it, and thus a very particular vision of the nationstate, was of considerable importance for the country's social and political elite. The railways played an important part in this. By enabling Queen Victoria to tour the country with great pomp and ceremony, they assisted in creating the 'traditions' that helped to popularize constitutional monarchy. But the museum does not present this fuller, certainly more scholarly and more critical view of the past. Instead it largely trades on and reproduces the myths of longevity, harmony and stability that remain central to the defence of monarchism in the present. Not all visitors will read the exhibition in this way. A good proportion subverts the narrative by entering at the 'wrong' end of the display. And while many visitors no doubt wallow in what they take to be a romantic and nostalgic presentation - the museum's marketing department saw those of late-middle-age and older as an important audience — others probably do not take it very seriously at all, particularly given that accoutrements such as the triumphal arch have, quite deliberately, something of the look of a cardboard cut-out. A careful reading of the introductory panel, with its detail of the huge workload and operating problems caused by royal trains, might well incline some visitors to a critical appraisal of royal travel. Indeed, given the present-day British 89

Making histories in transport museums monarchy's uncertain fortunes and dwindling popularity, especially among the young, it seems possible that public perceptions of the display are more critical than they (probably) were of earlier ones. The Station Hall's shortcomings are typical of those found not only in many other transport museums but also in many historical reconstructions that have nothing to do with transport.28 Part of the problem is that opportunities for new developments are so rare and money so tight that transport exhibitors, rightly or wrongly, often feel the need to exercise great caution in the way they treat the past. Few museums can risk controversies which may lose them visitors. Exhibitions like the Station Hall are also comparatively cheap to mount, partly because they do not involve much expenditure on developmental work with potential visitors. In short, while some exhibitors are undoubtedly too timid and reluctant to discard habitual ways of thinking about the past, there are also real constraints on their freedom to mount exhibitions that go beyond the safe and the banal. Before turning to an analysis of these challenges, however, we look briefly at what academic transport history has to offer exhibitors as a resource. Academic transport history Academic history is not the only kind of evidence that museums should draw upon in making more critical exhibitions since, for one thing, it rarely deals with the past in the personalized ways favoured by many visitors. But it certainly has a role to play, not least because it strives to provide answers to the 'why?' questions that must be asked if popular accounts of the past are to move beyond myth. Moreover, as our comments on the NRM suggest, exhibitors' knowledge of history needs to embrace more than the specialist field of transport, although here we restrict our remarks to the potential of transport for public historians. Transport history gathers together some very disparate ways of understanding the past. Nevertheless, for our purpose, it is possible to identify a number of common features, particularly as these relate to transport's wider social causes and purposes. In a magisterial survey published in 1991, Michael Robbins argued that transport history developed as a distinct academic subject (at least in the english-speaking world)from the

1910s. Pioneering studies by Edwin A. Pratt, an English journalist, and W T. Jackman, a Canadian academic, published in 1912 and 1916 respectively, treated the effects that the changing provision of transport facilities had had on social and economic life.29 We call this impact history, because it looked outwards/ra^ transport systems to the wider societies they served, showing how and why transport affected patterns of living at any given time, and how changes in its provision contributed to the development of

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[exhibiting social histories of transport social, economic and political processes. At some risk of over-simplification, impact history remains an important, yet by no means dominant, concern of academic writing. Impact approaches are complemented by those that look at how and why social, political and economic factors influenced the development of transport. We call this contextual history: the emphasis is from the social context, broadly understood, to the transport system or facility. Analysis of technological developments forms a part of this sort of history, but studies of finance and of relations with governments and, particularly, different forms of regulation and public control are also important.30 Both approaches could be useful in making exhibitions, although the prospects are uneven. Most work is concerned with just one mode of transport and some are more favoured than others. Railways have been particularly generously treated, with pipelines, animal and human modes among the more neglected. Certain aspects of these various modes have been more thoroughly studied than others, and in many cases the questions, language and answers of scholarly history are not particularly appropriate for public consumption. Exhibitors are sometimes faced with a considerable challenge in turning what academics write into a form that might appeal to visitors. In general, while scholars increasingly understand the causes of transport provision, they have traditionally given rather less attention to its social effects, although the imbalance is becoming less marked. Railways are well covered in the Anglo-American literature.31 But the effects on daily life of motor road transport (including buses, taxis and lorries) is an important but, at least in Britain, rather neglected field of study that might appeal to visitors. A similar comment applies to transport using animals.32 Similarly, apart from certain aspects of inland navigation, there has been little work on the impact of water transport, particularly the coastal and short-sea trades, although a clearer view is emerging here. The historiography of commercial air transport also tends to neglect the social sphere, being dominated by considerations of technological change and the strategies of national governments and aircraft corporations.33 Despite these gaps and shortcomings there is plenty of useful and accessible material available: much of it is neglected by all but a minority of exhibitors. Take road and urban transport as just two examples of a complaint that could be repeated, if rather tediously, for most other modes of civilian transport. Books such as Sean O'ConnelPs The Car in British Society, Clay McShane's Down the Asphalt Path, an analysis of the relationship between cars and urban life in North America, Peter J. Ling's America and the Automobile, which looks at both inter- and intra-urban travel, James J. Flink's comprehensive study of the USA, The Automobile Age, and Scott Bottles', Los Angeles and the Automobile, an examination of the

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politics of the rise to dominance of the car in southern California, are all examples of work which has had little influence on exhibitionary practice beyond the few exceptions cited earlier in this chapter.34 Similarly, subtle and detailed analyses of the interactions between urban life and transport in the tramway era, such as those on European and US cities by John P. McKay and Charles W. Cheape respectively, hold little sway in the world of tramway preservation and display.35 These social histories avoid the grosser simplifications of whiggish history. Dethroning the engineer from his privileged position as the technical expert, they often acknowledge the values and meanings placed upon transport by social groups that typically did not feature in the older accounts. For example, Wolfgang Schivelbusch's fascinating account of railway travel in the nineteenth century explores the contrasting attitudes of nations and social classes towards novel experiences of movement and perception.36 By offering such a multiplicity of perspectives on the meaning of transport and travel, academics provide exhibitors with intellectual resources that in turn can be laid out for the use of visitors. On the other hand, exhibitors need financial and other practical resources to turn such ideas into exhibitions, and securing these is not always a straightforward matter. The politics of exhibiting Who has the right to pronounce on the past? Any choice about how to represent the past in museums is bound to be, in a sense, political, because as we outlined in the first chapter popular consciousness has a contemporary importance in terms of social identity — the past of collective memories is chiefly known for what it can offer the present and the future. The represented past is the product of all sorts of constraints and pressures both within and without the museum: certain themes and narratives are privileged, perhaps unconsciously, over others, and the processes whereby this occurs are the politics of exhibiting or display. This is a kind of cultural politics, by which we mean any interaction among or between individuals or groups of people that bears upon the content of popular consciousness, and more particularly the exercise of power to this end. This usage embraces the familiar sense of the workings of the state and institutions of representative democracy, but it also includes negotiations carried out in far more localized and less publicly visible contexts, such as museums. Understanding how cultural politics shapes the poetics of any exhibition involves asking questions: Which groups of museum personnel are involved in the making of exhibitions? What interest groups from outside the museum have an influence? Who decides what themes should be 92

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exhibited? How are decisions made about what to include and what to exclude? Who is permitted to speak and who is not? Trying to answer such questions involves looking not only at discussions about exhibitionmaking within any given museum but also at what is not said or even thought, and how all of this relates to the museum's relationship to individuals, social groups and institutions in the world outside, such as visitors, potential visitors, funding bodies and other sponsors.37 Exhibitors, as we have just remarked, do not have anything like complete autonomy to decide on the form and content of 'their' displays. The constraints they face are sometimes experienced as overtly political — that is, as imposed by more powerful individuals or social groups. But more commonly they are perceived simply as practical difficulties requiring pragmatic solutions. This does not mean that the political dimension is any the less real. For instance, deadlines and budgets impose limits on the amount of research (perhaps on historical themes, or visitors' expectations) that can be undertaken in developing an exhibition, while, as we argued in Chapter 2, the nature of a museum's collection places further constraints on what can be done. All of these are political issues, broadly conceived, because matters such as levels of funding and the necessity and timescale for new exhibitions are all subject to negotiation within a museum, and between the museum and its various stakeholders. Even the museum's collection falls within the realm of the political since decisions about what to collect and what to deaccession rest partly upon negotiated judgements about what is 'relevant' and 'affordable'. Very little of the research undertaken in the 1990s on the politics of exhibiting looked at transport, although quite a lot focused more generally on science and technology.38 The exercise of power through control of finance emerged as one important theme. Otto Mayr, once director of the Deutsches Museum and a former acting director of the Smithsonian's (then) National Museum of History and Technology, argues that no museum 'can win a direct confrontation with its chief financial supporters', and that no matter how distanced these supporters are from the day-to-day running of the museums, they 'will tighten the leash with surprising sharpness' if an exhibition proves controversial.39 As a gross generalization, exhibitions that challenge dominant notions of national identity are most likely to be highly controversial. On the whole, transport museums do not test the limits of their paymasters' tolerance in this way. Nevertheless, the question of finance is one that deserves more scrutiny. The fear of offending those who provide money and other resources might prove to be a factor informing the way the social history of transport is treated in exhibitions. Differences in their financial and organizational arrangements offer fertile ground for detailed, comparative research into the politics of 93

Making histories in transport museums exhibiting in transport museums. There are many sources of funds, although visitors are hugely important in many, perhaps most, museums. Britain's National Tramway Museum, for instance, derived no less than 77 per cent of its total 1997 income of nearly £850,000 (US$1,350,000) from admissions and trading, and has no regular public funding.40 Making exhibitions attractive to 'the public' is therefore an important consideration, but this is usually done on the basis of past experience and hunches of what visitors will enjoy or tolerate — a cautious, even conservative approach. But not all transport museums are so directly reliant on their visitors for income. National museums such as the NRM often depend heavily on grants from the state, while yet others - the London Transport Museum, for instance - look chiefly to commercial or semi-commercial corporations for money. Yet even so these museums usually have to bear in mind their visitors' preferences since many funding agencies value levels of visitation above other performance indicators. Whatever the deeper reasons, few transport museums have had the funds, imagination or will to tackle the social context of transport in ways that risk controversy. A rare exception is Britain's National Maritime Museum, which in 1999 opened a new^ gallery on maritime trade and British imperialism. Although the historical themes and their critical treatment were unexceptional from a scholarly perspective, one critic said that the exhibition was 'aimed "at depriving the British people of any aspect of their history in which they can take justifiable pride" '.41 But the supreme exemplar of Mayr's dictum is the Enola Gay exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) in Washington, DC. This display of the aircraft which dropped the first nuclear bomb on Japan opened in 1995 in a much modified and scaled-down version from that originally conceived, after intense lobbying from ex-servicemen had succeeded in bringing congressional pressure to bear on the museum's administrators. Since the Enola Gay was a military aircraft it strictly falls outside the scope of this book. But the fierce, acrimonious and increasingly public controversy over the exhibition that bore its name was so bound up with the institutional history and character of the NASM that it cannot fail to underscore the point that public histories of transport are inherently political.42 The original script to the exhibition set out to provide an alternative to the celebratory narratives of technological nationalism, firmly embedded at the NASM since its opening in 1976, by questioning whether the dropping of the bomb was justified. Academic critics such as historians Michael McMahon and Alex Roland have always been clear about the NASM's purpose and the strength of the political lobby supporting it. Conceived in congressional legislation passed in 1946 during a period of patriotic fervour after the Second World War, the museum's

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most influential political supporters during its long and difficult gestation saw it as a place, in Roland's words, to 'memorialise the national development of aviation' and later space flight; as he also remarks, for at least some of the museum's advocates '"memorialise" clearly meant "enshrine"'.43 In 1981 McMahon described the museum as largely a giant advertisement for [US] air and space technology'.44 Such symbolism is reinforced by the museum's location at the heart of the nation's capital, guaranteeing both huge audiences and close scrutiny of exhibitions.45 The Smithsonian's questioning of the narrative of technological nationalism was thus always likely to be highly controversial, particularly in the context of a military display 50 years after the end of the Second World War.46 Highly visible controversies over nationalist displays of transport are not, however, typical of the politics of display. Regional and local transport museums arguably have more freedom than national ones to explore the past from a variety of perspectives and perhaps to risk controversy because their concerns are less symbolically charged, or at any rate this symbolism touches a smaller number of people. Removed from the glare of national publicity these museums are able to explore mundane, everyday issues that resonate with their visitors' personal concerns. Yet even in these museums there will still be a politics of display, hidden as it were in debates, discussions, negotiations, assumptions, claims and counter-claims within the museum and between the museum and its stakeholders. As Sharon Macdonald observes, the politics of any exhibition is a complex and subtle matter of '(often implicit) negotiation: a dynamic power-play of competing knowledges, intentions and interests'.47 Corporate sponsorship usually works in this fashion. Its effects are, not surprisingly, most prominent in company-owned and -funded museums. Max-Gerrit von Pein, director of the Mercedes-Benz Museum, has remarked that in museums such as his 'it is not the visitors' interests which form the main focus, but the role which the company expects its museum to play!48 When corporate sponsorship is so obvious visitors can more readily make allowances for its influence. But corporate sponsorship is also a practical necessity for many other transport museums, even those in receipt of government finance. Joseph Corn sees corporate involvement as one of several reasons for the celebratory style of many transport exhibitions. Corporations rarely employ crude financial muscle to cower an exhibition's makers into following a particular line. Yet, as Corn observes, the desire to retain good relations with sponsors can foster 'an interpretive climate that ensures that corporate and institutional sponsors are not offended'. Others have raised the issue in relation to specific displays. Guillaume de Syon, for example, wonders whether corporate financing by Zeppelin, BMW and Volkswagen is the reason why exhibitions about these German manufacturers are neglectful of the Nazi period. Similarly Paul 95

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Graves-Brown thinks that a high level of commercial sponsorship is at least partly responsible in Britain's National Motor Museum for what he sees as an overly celebratory display of the social history of motoring and a neglect of the environmental consequences of the mass use of cars.49 But more research needs to be done before such plausible speculations can be taken as fact. Studies of corporately sponsored exhibitions on contemporary technological and scientific issues come to conclusions broadly similar to Corn's.50 But to our knowledge only one critic has studied the production of a civil transport exhibition closely enough to pronounce with any authority on the effects of corporate sponsorship. Richard Rogers' analysis of the Science Museum's 'Channel Tunnel: The Whole Story' (opened in 1994 and then exhibited in a modified form from 1995 at the NRM) comes to some worrying, if not wholly surprising, conclusions. The exhibition was fairly unusual in that it dealt with a contemporary subject, and one of great public interest, although it did have a historical component. In particular the display looked at the safety of the tunnel (although it predated, and so did not treat, the serious fire that occurred shortly after the tunnel's opening). The Channel Tunnel's owners, Eurotunnel, gave £120,000 (US$190,000) towards the display. The company had no direct influence on design or content (the Science Museum's policy on sponsorship forbade this), and Rogers emphasizes that the exhibition team strove to maintain a critical distance from the company's official line. Nonetheless he found that Eurotunnel's assumptions and frames of reference often shaped the narrative: 'the intention of the exhibit is to point up, then summarily assuage, all fears of the Channel Tunnel'.51 In some instances this involved the suppression of issues that did not fit easily with Eurotunnel's policies. For example, despite considerable research into controversial matters such as the non-segregation of passengers from their vehicles or the extent of the security measures designed to detect explosives, no mention of these appeared in the final exhibition. Similarly, Eurotunnel's commercial frame of reference informed the treatment of travel times across the Channel. Although the exhibition did not take the company's estimates at face value, it tended to suggest that the best way of crossing the Channel is the fastest - that is, by using the tunnel. The possible advantages of using other forms of transport - the ferry or the aeroplane - were simply ignored. All in all, Rogers concluded 'the exhibit is a subtle sell' for Eurotunnel's point of view.52 The research being done on exhibitions of science and technology provides inspiration for further theoretically informed studies of the politics of making transport exhibitions. Macdonald, for example, argues that exhibitors and sponsors may be able to work together, despite conflicting views, because an exhibition's contents can be given different 96

Exhibiting social histories ot transport political inflections.53 As she stresses, one lesson here is that what is left unsaid and unchallenged in the production of an exhibition can be more important than overt disagreements over what, by comparison, are only details. Indeed it is important more generally to understand how a localized micro-politics of consensus is sustained, perhaps through shared, deep-set cultural assumptions.54 Studies of this kind would be particularly relevant to transport exhibitions since in their final form they are usually characterized by high levels of agreement between exhibitors, sponsors and other stakeholders. It remains an open question, however, whether this lack of controversy masks substantive disagreements, negotiations and compromises during the process of making exhibitions. Visitors, scholarship and interpretive diversity It would be easy to become pessimistic about the future of transport exhibitions. As though financial constraints and other 'practical' problems were not enough, the blunt lesson of the Enola Gay controversy, and perhaps too of the less visible processes of negotiation associated with the likes of corporate sponsorship, seems to be that powerful groups from outside the museum can impose their conception of the past. But transport exhibitors could do much more to work with their visitors (and would-be visitors) in making challenging and engaging histories, perhaps in the process creating spaces for exhibitions that move beyond re-presenting myths about transport's past. Pamela Walker Laird hits the nail on the head when she remarks that exhibitors can 'avoid paralysis by taking no part in complacent assumptions that the truth will out of its own accord, or elitist assumptions that the citizenry is a hopeless lot!55 There are, in other words, two extremes to avoid. One is the argument that simply mounting more comprehensive and scholarly displays will be enough to interest visitors; the other, that since most visitors do not have the same deep and disciplined interest in the past as academic historians there is no need to worry overly about the historical content of exhibitions - in other words, the public will be happy enough with myth. What is needed instead is a recognition that people have a right to make use of exhibitions as they see fit, while not denying them opportunities to develop and stretch their appreciation of the past. Transport museums should be places that help people to understand more about the process of making sense of the past, that help them make up their own minds about history and how this affects them in the present and in the future. Achieving this requires an extremely difficult balancing act as, in Macdonald's words, museums 'negotiate a nexus between cultural production and consumption, and between expert and lay knowledge'.56 It is 97

Making histories in transport museums quite impossible to conceive of a return to the days when curators expected visitors' unquestioning acceptance of everything that was put before them. History museums are no longer 'temples' in which 'the past' is held up for public instruction and edification. Yet in becoming something more like a forum, a site for informal debate with and between visitors about 'the past' and its relevance for the present, museums and more particularly exhibitors have an important role to play in initiating 'debates' and making sure that these are informed by the best understanding that scholarship can deliver.57 All sorts of objections may be raised against this argument, some more serious than others. It could be said, for example, that one lesson of the Eno/a Gay controversy is that any attempt at sharing intellectual authority with the public inevitably leads to a kind of mob rule determining the content of exhibitions. This is too pessimistic. Sharing authority with visitors need not mean surrendering it. Exhibitors, or for that matter intellectuals more generally, have not lost a 'war' for cultural authority in the public arena.58 A more serious, and related, attack is on the very notion of historical scholarship in museums and elsewhere, by thinkers of a sceptical (and, in one sense of that much abused word, postmodern) persuasion. This is a large issue that commands books in its own right; all we can do here is delineate the main contours of the debate and indicate briefly our reasons for adopting the position we do. Some philosophers and social theorists, and even a few historians, maintain that it is not plausible to take even the most thoroughly researched of historical accounts as a touchstone against which to 'judge' and 'correct' other ways of knowing the past. This was, for example, an important issue during the Eno/a Gay controversy; the Smithsonian's critics mounted a sophisticated and effective attack on exhibitors' authority to pronounce on 'what really happened'. More politically adept than the Smithsonian, the veterans and their allies in Congress used their power to define what was, and what was not, to count as ways of knowing about the past, privileging personal experience (or more accurately recollection) over scholarly analysis.59 We are not persuaded, however, that academic historiography is just another narrative on a par with all other accounts of the past.60The most important characteristic of historical scholarship is that it is self-critical. Absolute truth in writing history is unattainable for all sorts of reasons, including the incompleteness of evidence and the unavoidable bias of even the most detached of historians. Nevertheless, 'truth' serves as an ideal encouraging historians to examine their premisses and assumptions and thus to develop more inclusive perspectives on the past. 'Historians,' David Lowenthal reminds us, 'do aim higher than they can reach':

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Exhibiting social histories of transport They know they cannot retrieve or recount the past in unbiased entirety or shorn of anachronism, yet they strive to do so as far as they can. Aware that such effort is inherently imperfect, they nonetheless cleave to what seems honest. Knowing they cannot be objective, they feel at least impartial . . . Save for a post-modern solipsist fringe that fancies all history fatally flawed, historians trust that research enlarges what is known of the actual past. Though their own traits and biases shape that knowledge, it retains an integral autonomy; the past as known is bent, but is never wholly broken, to historians' particular views.61 In short, the methods and skills that make up the craft of researching and writing history (historiography) offer a lesson in process as much as they lead to 'results'. Ultimately in the museum context the most important thing is to make visitors aware of the provisional nature of all knowledge of the past, and to help them to develop the confidence and skills needed to come to their own conclusions based, at least in part, on what historical scholarship has to offer. Transport museums would do well, for example, to follow Walker Laird's call for outreach programmes along the lines of those instigated by archaeologists, teaching about the 'joys and responsibilities of exploring and honoring evidence'. On the other hand, exhibitors must recognize the limits of their own grasp on the past and the validity, at least within certain limits, of those of visitors. They must develop exhibitions that give Voice' to these other points of view, not least because visitors who recognize their own understanding of the past are more likely then to consider the alternative perspectives of historians and of other social groups. As Walker Laird observes, public historians serve history best who advocate at least the recognition of interpretative diversity at every opportunity precisely because for too long museums and other public forums spoke with single voices that denied some of our understandings and experiences. For scholarship that values diverse voices to survive . . . its advocates must help their fellow citizens appreciate what history has to offer them. Interpretative diversity offers both a tool and a goal to that end. Therefore, bringing together public and scholarly discourses involves routinely comparing and explaining the various remembered and documented pasts whenever pertinent to public history exhibitions . . . The key to working with memory as scholars and citizens comes from our historians' appreciation for diversity, which has taught us that no particular memory can be allowed to trump other forms of evidence.62 This is a lesson that transport exhibitors would do well to heed.

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Making histories in transport museums Exhibiting diversity at the national level: the Verkehrshaus der Schweiz Few transport exhibitions incorporate interpretive diversity. But there are a few instances of good practice that give grounds for some optimism about future possibilities. In 1997 the Verkehrshaus der Schweiz (Swiss Museum of Transport and Communication) opened a permanent exhibition, 'Railways Through the Alps'. The museum needed to win new audiences, and it aimed to do so partly by exhibiting a range of points of view. The exhibition departs significantly from the museum's traditional philosophy. The original formalist displays of railway vehicles developed in the late 1950s and 1960s celebrated Swiss nationalism, but by the 1970s they had lost much of their relevance since for most visitors the railway was now but a minor part of everyday life. Financial constraints in the 1980s prevented the realization of plans to revise the museum's displays, but falling visitor numbers in the 1990s encouraged a successful search for more sponsorship (mostly from the nationalized railway system), finally permitting the opening of the new exhibition. Focusing in particular on the St Gotthard railway and its lengthy tunnel, the display was conceived with the political and social histories of trans-Alpine railways very much to the fore. According to one of its developers, it seeks to show how Swiss railways and Swiss society were mutually shaped, attention being given particularly to problematic issues of national identity manifest in language and culture. The intended audience embraces both Swiss nationals and foreign visitors. The museum has tried to introduce this broad audience to some of the complexities of Swiss social and political history. The exhibition offers a directed narrative with three principal stages. The brunt of the interpretive burden is borne by a short trip in 'time cars' through a reconstruction of the St Gotthard Tunnel as it was being built. As far as practicable visitors experience something of the kind of conditions suffered by the labourers while the tunnel was being drilled. Before and after this diorama are animated discussions (using Pepper's ghosts) concerning the process of deciding the tunnel's route; the negotiations between the railway company's director and the contracting engineer; everyday life in the navvies' camps; and, finally, discussions among engineers about the development of drilling machines. The last stage of the journey is a display of original artefacts relating to the tunnel's construction, intended to validate the preceding diorama. At one level the exhibition offers a fairly traditional commemoration of the technical achievement of the tunnel's construction, although the simulative techniques are considerably more sophisticated than those found in most transport museums. On the other hand, visitors are immediately offered another perspective on the significance of the tunnel

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when they encounter the lives of labourers and their families in the camps. The symbolism of this and the other 'discussions' is meant to operate at the deeper level of the historical roots of contemporary Swiss national identity. The challenges of linguistic differences and the existence of cultural diversity within the nation are represented by the communication between the French-Swiss building contractor and the GermanSwiss director of the railway company. The more politically contentious issues of the Italian-speaking community and foreign immigration are also alluded to by way of the inclusion of such groups in the labourers' dialogue. Finally, visitors are given the chance to understand the changing mythic significance of the tunnel with regard to Swiss politics and national identity. Thus, for instance, reference is made to the fact that during the Second World War the St Gotthard Tunnel was seen both physically and symbolically as part of the defence of Switzerland's neutral status, while in more recent times it has been reinterpreted as an essential part of Switzerland's role as place of transit serving the whole of Europe.63 Of course none of this means that the exhibition satisfies all its visitors, or that it deals with all possible controversies concerning Swiss identity in the past and present. Any display has to be selective, excluding some voices as it includes others. But at least the Swiss exhibition begins to acknowledge the changing influence of the present on the way the past is represented, opening up the possibility that visitors will be encouraged to reflect themselves on how they understand the wider history of Switzerland and its railways. Exhibiting diversity at a local level So far in this book we have largely considered the ways in which transport exhibitions might contribute to national identities. But many, indeed probably most, transport museums and collections focus on more geographically, culturally, economically and politically circumscribed territories or institutions than the nation. Museums that deal with the transport of a city or a region, or with the services or products provided by a single company, might well draw upon national myths but they are also likely to be informed by a sense of the particular places or institutions they represent. Such identities may be as contested at those at the national level, and hence it is just as important for exhibitors to introduce interpretive diversity into displays. Academic studies might be one source of the information and the insights needed to do this: another might be research with local communities.64 The specialized studies often favoured by lay historians of transport are another potentially useful but often overlooked source. Such histories are often rich in the details of the 'what', 'when', and 101

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'who' that strongly appeal to many people. In Britain, for example, the Oakwood Library of Railway History has published local studies since the 1930s, and in recent years many of these have moved beyond a parochial fascination with arcane details of locomotives, rolling stock and operating practices to embrace aspects of social history. These books often have a strong narrative structure, usually following a chronological sequence of events relating to a number of themes. At their best such narratives provide some explanation of events and historical characters as well as the basis for a conventional, didactic exhibition (graphic panels and perhaps small artefacts) telling a straightforward history of the railway. Take for instance B. L. Jackson and M. J. Tattershall's history of their

4 mile (15km) branch line serving Bridport, a small town

in Dorset in the south of England. The chapter titles give some idea of the overall narrative structure, a combination of chronology and geographical description: 'Early Railway Developments'; 'Construction'; 'The Broad Gauge Era'; 'The Final Ifears of Independence'; 'The Great Western Era'; 'The Route Described'; 'Nationalisation to Closure'.65 But within this slightly unpromising structure the authors include a considerable amount of social history, giving a lively sense of what the railway contributed to the local community over the 117 years of its existence. Moreover, their findings are not always what is expected given the miasma of nostalgia that often envelops the English branch line. By including bus services within their remit they show, for example, just how early in the twentieth century the line became a practical irrelevance for the overwhelming majority of those living in and around Bridport. Given that the closure of the railway in 1975 was vigorously opposed and is within living memory, the likely appeal to a local constituency of an exhibition drawing on this theme needs little emphasis. With a little imagination a museum could turn what would otherwise be a good microscopic display aimed chiefly at the local community into an exhibition for a wider audience. For instance, the Bridport branch could be presented as a microcosm of the world of rural railways in England. The exhibition would encourage visitors to speculate more generally and deeply about the ways people think about these railways, and how they are represented by historians, amateur and professional: How useful were they? Who used them? For how long? The image of the branch line as quintessentially English might come under close scrutiny66 Considering the fate of the bus services that replaced the Bridport branch would help to connect the not-so-distant past with the present day. With a growing debate in Britain about transport policy and the prospects for the few remaining rural branches, an exhibition along these lines could capture the imagination of a much larger and wider audience than one might at first suspect. 102

Exhibiting social histories of transport While all this could be done in the form of a conventional didactic exhibition, it might have more appeal, and better serve the purpose of developing visitors' own skills at understanding the past, if exhibitors worked against the grain of the strongly narrative form of the typical local study by introducing a range of voices into the display. A story-telling structure simplifies in order to clarify and make coherent, and in particular might not include diverse interpretations or accounts of the past. By contrast, the voices in our imagined exhibition might be those of historical figures, reflecting different views about a branch railway; some opinions might complement one another, others might be opposed. Users and workers could feature as distinct voices, each with their own interest in and perceptions of the line; proponents and opponents of closure could also make their case. Local studies such as Jackson and Tattershall's sometimes contain material that could be used in this way, although often it will have to be extracted from an overarching narrative. This is not always necessary. Andrew P. M. Wright's book on another Dorset line, the Swanage branch (now a heritage railway), is structured as fifteen 'tales' based on oral accounts of railway staff at all levels, former users, and a number of those involved during the 1960s and 1970s in the campaigns to save the passenger service and reopen the line.67 It has the makings of an interesting and engaging exhibition. In this instance the multiple voices are those of historical actors with their different views about the railway. It is one of the tasks of the historian to recover these voices and to understand how they relate to one another. The agreements and opposition between railway workers and their managers, for instance, may be a focus of historians' search for understanding. Local studies might be used to introduce visitors to the processes of researching and writing about the past, as Pamela Walker Laird has suggested. Why not, for instance, get visitors to work with the sort of evidence used by historians - newspapers, oral accounts, company minute books and so on? However, there is another sense of multiple voices that needs to be introduced into exhibitions, that of debate between historians themselves. The challenges of working with contradictory and incomplete records might then feature along with the processes of discussion, agreement and disagreement that are an integral part of the historiographic process. Doing this might not be particularly easy to develop in the context of local studies of transport since alternative readings of the past are rare. It is, however, something that could be done quite easily by drawing on academic work. Moving beyond the book-on-the-wall We have argued that transport museums should help visitors to reflect critically on the past. But as we have intimated, how this is done through

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the medium of an exhibition is as important as the 'messages'. In the 1990s some museum professionals and commentators argued that the swing towards highly interpreted exhibitions had marginalized a unique and valuable feature of all museums, their collections of objects, and that ways should be found to reverse this. Yet transport museums, in another striking example of their capacity for retarded borrowing, are in danger of perpetuating a technique too long familiar from the generality of social history displays - the 'book-on-the-wall'. Here we briefly review this form of interpretation as a prelude to Chapter 4, which explores the possibilities for a new generation of object-centred exhibitions. It is possible to imagine a social history exhibition dispensing entirely with objects, using graphic panels and other kinds of non-artefactual evidence (drama, video, tapes, etc.) to convey historical narratives. Few, if any, displays go to these lengths - more common is the mixing of objects with these other kinds of evidence and interpretation. Many writers have analysed such exhibitions, well described as books-on-the-wall, for as Steven D. Lavine remarks, they are 'driven by interpretive ideas and . . . organised as narratives'. Objects are no longer the primary focus, although they 'retain significance as corroborative evidence': or more bluntly from Michael Ettema, objects 'are the props, not the message'.68 Joseph Corn's analysis of industrial museums is subtler. He argues that while in some cases interpretation may 'in effect become the exhibit', with real objects being marginal to the story, sometimes two parallel narratives are set up, the one drawing upon social history having nothing to do with that embodied in the artefacts.69 All these failings are commonly found in transport museums. For instance, objects were rather marginal to the original, temporary version of the NRM exhibition on the role of women on the railways, mounted in the mid-1990s (Figure 3.3). This used a wide range of material by way of evidence and interpretation. A rich mix of graphic panels, photographs, sounds, video clips, oral testimony and interactives as well as large and small objects gave an idea of the many ways in which women have been employed on the railways over the last 250 years. The exhibition was very popular and the objects certainly played a part in this success. For instance, a mannequin dressed as a woman in overalls shovelling ash from the smokebox of one of the adjacent locomotives attracted visitors' attention to the exhibition; once inside, the opportunity to work levers weighted to simulate the effect of operating a mechanical signal gave some sense of the physical effort required. Yet for all this, the exhibition's core narrative as social history was chiefly carried by a series of 20 graphic panels, each of which focused on the jobs occupied by women during specific historical periods. These panels did not attempt systematically to relate women's experience to the objects on display. 104

Figure 3.3 'Oh! Mrs Porter: Women at work on the railways', a temporary exhibition at the National Railway Museum, 1996. Photo, National Railway Museum.

Making histories in transport museums Parallel narratives are found, for example, at the California State Railroad Museum. In a generally favourable early review, John H. White noted that for all the museum's emphasis on social history, 'what is really being shown are locomotives and rolling stock . . . very traditional items of railroad-museum hardware'.70 And as Corn makes clear regarding the same museum, the problem is that the interpretation, keyed to the personal dimension of railroading and built around appropriately costumed manikins of brakemen, conductors, and other railroad workers, with taped accounts by railroad veterans, sheds little light on the locomotives and rolling stock.71 The London Transport Museum, comprehensively redisplayed in 1993-94 with a much greater emphasis on social history, suffers from a similar tension in parts of the display. On the whole the main floor of the museum is an illustrated narrative dealing with the social and economic history of transport and travel in the metropolis, but in some sections (notably the exhibits on street transport) parallel narratives are set up between the vehicles and this broader interpretation. Buses and tramcars are lined up in attractive but essentially traditional arrangements, telling stories defined largely in terms of technological characteristics and progress. The effect is not only to create the two narratives but also to marginalize the more sophisticated, but less visually striking, social histories conveyed by the graphic panels, videos and computer-based labels.72 These two exhibitions were essentially new. But in established museums practical considerations often lead to such parallel narratives — exhibitors, aware of the need to update displays but mindful of financial and other constraints, graft a veneer of social history onto existing exhibitions. The orientation galleries mentioned at the start of this chapter are a common way of doing this. Often physically separate from the older formalist displays they are meant to contextualize, such exhibitions use graphic panels, videos, oral recollections, and so on to carry the burden of storytelling, although they sometimes supplement these techniques with small objects or models. In such cases one finds all the difficulties identified by Corn. Within the orientation gallery, interpretation overwhelms the objects; within the museum as a whole, parallel narratives are set up between the new gallery and the older displays. Although there are circumstances in which a bo ok-on-the-wall is an appropriate way of communicating about the past, there are at least two reasons for avoiding it whenever possible. In the first place, the failure to place objects at the heart of exhibitions leaves museums' unique contribution to public history open to question. Thus Otto Mayr argues that museums' cultural authority must be firmly rooted in their collections and research on them; if a museum 'merely disseminates the results of con-

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ventional academic scholarship, it does so on borrowed authority' for it will be Vulnerable to questions not only about the specific reliability of such secondhand contributions but also about the essential merits of the activity'.73 Secondly, visitors are more likely to engage with historical objects, especially those with which they have some familiarity, than with any graphic panel or written text. The pull of the 'real thing' is very strong. As many others have noted, people know and appreciate that authentic things bear a continuing relationship to their original time and place; objects, in Susan Pearce's estimation,'alone have the power, in some sense, to carry the past into the present by virtue of their relationship to past events'.74 Moreover our argument throughout this book is that it is the symbolism of objects that ultimately matters and, as Falk and Dierking argue, for most visitors it is best to introduce abstract ideas, such as those about history, through 'a solid foundation of concrete understanding . . . and the concrete of the novice, not that of an expert'. This can be done by contextualizing historical objects through multi-sensory and multi-media techniques that help visitors get information through visual, aural and tactile methods. Exhibitions that focus on objects in this way have the potential to develop visitors' skills in decoding social meanings.75 The conclusion is inescapable: visitors' sense of the past is best developed through making objects, suitably interpreted, the focus of exhibitions. To appropriate Joseph Corn's imperative, the challenge is to find ways that transport museums can make histories through the objects that dominate their collections.76 This is the purpose of the next chapter. Notes 1. Gaynor Kavanagh,'Objects as evidence, or not?', in Susan M. Pearce (ed.), Museum Studies in Material Culture, Leicester University Press, London, 1989, 125-37, at 125-6. 2. C. Hamilton Ellis, London on Wheels: An Exhibition of London Travel in the Nineteenth Century, British Transport Commission, London, 1953; The National Railway Museum, NRM/Jarrold Colour Publications, Norwich, 1975, 3-4. 3. Jack Simmons, Transport Museums in Britain and Western Europe, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1970, 119-20. The Boat Museum at Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, now a partner in an enlarged National Waterways Museum, opened in 1976 with a display of boats intended to symbolize the people who were 'born, reared, worked and died in them'. Tony Hirst, Alan Jones and Keith Robinson, The Boat Museum: The National Waterways Museum, National Waterways Museum, Ellesmere Port, n.d., 2-5. 4. Michael Blakemore (ed.), Great Railway Show at the National Railway Museum, National Railway Museum, York, 1990. 107

Making histories in transport museums 5. Peter D. Barton, 'Horseshoe Curve and the Altoona Railroaders Memorial Museum, Altoona' and Stephen E. Drew, 'The California State Railroad Museum', both in Rob Shorland-Ball (ed.), Common Roofs - Separate Branches: Railway History and Preservation, Science Museum/National Railway Museum, York, 1994, 43-7, 191-4; John H. White, 'The California State Railroad Museum: a Louvre for \ocomo\xves\TechnologyandCulture, 24 (1983), 644-54; Rudi Volti, 'The Petersen Automotive Museum', Technology and Culture, 36 (1995), 646-50; John K. Brown, '"America's Great Road" at the B&O Railroad Museum', Technology and Culture, 36 (1995), 641-5; talk by William Withuhn, Curator of Transportation, NMAH, Deutsches Museum, Munich, October 1998. 6. Alfred Gottwaldt, A philosophy of display', in Shorland-Ball (ed.), Common Roofs, 210-14, at 210. 7. David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, Viking, London, 1997,14-21. 8. See the following essays in Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig (eds), History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1989: Mary H. Blewett, 'Machines, workers, and capitalists: the interpretation of textile industrialization in New England museums', 26293, at 263-4; Thomas J. Schlereth, 'History museums and material culture', 294-320, at 302; Joseph J. Corn, 'Tools, technologies and contexts: interpreting the history of American technics', 237-61, at 244-7. In relation to industrial museums, see also Lawrence Fitzgerald, 'Hard men, hard facts and heavy metal: making histories of technology', in Gay nor Kavanagh (ed.), Making Histories in Museums, Leicester University Press, London, 1996, 116-130; Alan Morton, 'Tomorrow's yesterdays: science museums and the future', in Robert Lumley (ed.), The MuseumTime-Machine, Comedia, London, 1988, 128-43; Jim Bennett, 'Can science museums take history seriously?', and Thomas F. Gieryn,'Balancing acts: science, Enola Cay, and history wars at the Smithsonian', both in Sharon Macdonald (ed.), The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture, Routledge, London, 1998, 173-82, 197-228. 9. See for instance the essays published in Transport Museums, the journal of the International Association of Transport and Communication Museums. 10. John A. Latschar, 'The Steamtown solution', in Shorland-Ball (ed.), Common Roots, 170-5. 11. Corn, 'Tools, technologies and context', 239-41; Neil Cossons, 'Messages from motor museums', in John S. Moore (ed.), World Forumfor Motor Museums: Papers of the Fourth Forum, NE Consultancy, Gaydon, 1996, 7-13; Michael E. Ware, A future for motor museums?', Transport Museums, 24 (1998), 35-41. 12. Steven D. Lavine, 'Museum practices', in Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (eds), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC, 1991,151-8, at 152. 13. Michael J. Ettema, 'History museums and the culture of materialism', in Jo 108

Exhibiting social histories of transport Blatti (ed.), Past Meets Present: Essays about Historic Interpretation and Public Audiences, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC, 1987, 62-85 at 63. 14. E. H. Carr, What Is History?, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1964, 87. 15. Ettema, 'History museums', 63. 16. John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking, The Museum Experience, Whalesback, Washington DC, 1992,131. 17. For general critiques, see for instance, Susan M. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections: A Cultural Study, Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1992, 198201, 207-8; Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, Routledge, London, 1995,109-27. 18. Michael Bommes and Patrick Wright,' "Charms of residence": the public and the past', in Richard Johnson, Gregor McLennan, Bill Schwarz and David Sutton (eds), Making Histories: Studies in History-Writing and Politics, Hutchinson, London, 1982, 253-301, at 265. 19. Bommes and Wright, 'Charms of residence', 253-301; Vera L. Zolberg, 'Museums as contested sites of remembrance: the Enola Gay affair', in Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe (eds), Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World, Blackwell/Sociological Review, Oxford, 1996, 69-82; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London and New York, 2nd edn, 1991; Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999. 20. David Brett, The Construction of Heritage, Cork University Press, Cork, 1996, 101-2. 21. Gaynor Kavanagh, History Curatorship, Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1990,132-3. 22. Handel Kardas, 'Museum visitors - and what they expect', and Rob Shorland-Ball,' "All Change" — new buildings and displays at the National Railway Museum, 1988-1992', both in Neil Cossons, Allan Patmore and Rob Shorland-Ball (eds), Perspectives on Railway History and Interpretation, National Railway Museum, York, 1992,136-58, at 143,151. 23. Michael Robbins, The Railway Age, Mandolin, Manchester, 3rd edn, 1998, 76-90; David Howell, Respectable Radicals: Studies in the Politics of Railway Trade Unionism, Ashgate, Aldershot, 1999, 1-23. 24. George E. Hein, Learning in the Museum, Routledge, London, 1998, 25-9. 25. Richard Sykes, Alastair Austin, Mark Fuller, Taki Kinoshita and Andrew Shrimpton,'Steam attraction: railways in Britain's national heritage', Journal of Transport History, 18 (1997), 156-75, at 161. This criticism was directed primarily at 'The Great Railway Show'; the present Station Hall is not significantly different, however. 26. Sykes etal., 'Steam attraction', 160-3. 27. C. Hamilton Ellis, Royal journey: A Retrospective of Royal Trains in the British Isles, British Transport Commission, London, 1953. It is not too fanciful to trace 109

Making histories in transport museums

28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

the pedigree of the present exhibition back to the earliest form of transport displays, those horse-drawn road carriages exhibited as symbols of political power. Simmons, Transport Museums, 22. See for instance almost any exhibition review in Technology and Culture, such as the five published in its July 1995 issue, vol. 36, 625-50. These were all written by academics. But museum professionals can be just as critical: see e.g. Paul Graves-Brown,'Road to nowhere', Museums journal, 96 (November 1996), 25-7; Lawrence Fitzgerald, 'Travel bugs', Museums journal, 94 (August 1994), 31-4. Michael Robbins, 'The progress of transport history', journal of Transport History, 12 (1991), 74-87. Robbins, 'Progress', 80-5; Jack Simmons and Michael Robbins, 'Forty years on: a message from the founding fathers', journal of Transport History, 14 (1993), iv-vi. The literature on railways is extensive. For introductory texts on Britain, see e.g. Robbins, Railway Age; on the USA, e.g. John F. Stover, American Railroads, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2nd edn, 1997; Sarah H. Gordon, Passage to Union: How the KailroadsTransformedAmerican Life, 1829-1929, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1996; John Stilgoe, Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 1983. Editor's introduction to Margaret Walsh (ed.), Motor Transport, Ashgate, Aldershot, 1997, ix-xxiii, and to Dorian Gerhold (ed.), Road Transport in the Horse-Drawn Era, Scolar Press, Aldershot, 1996, ix-xx; T. C. Barker and Dorian Gerhold, The Rise and Rise of Road Transport, 1770-1990, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1993; T C. Barker, 'Slow progress: forty years of motoring research', Journal of Transport History, 14 (1993), 142-65; Dorian Gerhold, Road Transport Before the Railways: Russell's London Flying Waggons, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993. Editor's introduction to Gerald Crompton (ed.), Canals and Inland Navigation, ix-xxii, to John Armstrong (ed.), Coastal and Short Sea Shipping, ix-xxiv, esp. xiii— xx, and to Peter J. Lyth (ed.), AirTransport, ix-xxi, all Scolar Press, Aldershot, 1996; and to Hans-Liudger Dienel and Peter Lyth (eds), Flying the Flag: European Commercial AirTransport since 1945, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1998,1-17. Sean O'Connell, The Car in British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring 1896-1939, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1998; Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City, Columbia University Press, New York, 1994; Peter J. Ling, America and the Automobile: Technology Reform and Social Change, 1893-1923, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1990; James F. Flink, The Automobile Age, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1988; Scott L. Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile, University of California Press, Berkeley CA, 1987. C. W. Cheape, Moving the Masses: Urban Public Transit in New York, Boston and Philadelphia, 1880-1912, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1980; John 110

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36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

P. McKay, Tramways and trolleys: The Rise of Urban Mass Transport in Europe, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1977. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialisation of Space and Time in the Nineteenth Century, Berg, Leamington Spa, 1986, esp. 52-88. Sharon Macdonald, 'Exhibitions of power and power of exhibition: an introduction to the politics of display' in Sharon Macdonald (ed.), The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture, Routledge, London, 1998,1-24, esp. 1-5. Macdonald (ed.), Politics of Display, passim. Otto Mayr, 'The Enola Gay fiasco: history, politics and the museum', Technology and Culture, 39 (1998), 462-73, at 464. The equivalent figures for 1998 were nearly 73 per cent of just over £851,000. Annual report and accounts of the National Tramway Museum, 1997, 1998. Guardian, 23 August and 25 August 1999. Bibliographical details and a useful retrospective on the controversy are given in 'The Last Act', Technology and Culture, 39 (1998), 457-98. See also Philip Nobile, 'On the steps of the Smithsonian: Hiroshima denial in America's attic', in Philip Nobile (ed.), judgement at the Smithsonian, Marlowe, New York, n.d. [1995], xviii—xcvii; Gieryn, 'Balancing acts', 197—228; Zolberg, 'Museums as contested sites', 69-82. Alex Roland,'Celebration or education? the goals of the U.S. National Air and Space Museum', in Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus (ed.), Industrial Society and Its Museums 1890-1990: Social Aspirations and Cultural Politics, Harwood Academic, Reading, 1993, 77-89, quotes at 81, 83. Michael McMahon, 'The romance of technological progress: a critical review of the National Air and Space Museum' Technology and Culture, 22 (1981), 281-96, quote at 281. Alex Roland, 'Voices in the museum' Technology and Culture, 39 (July 1998), 483^-88, at 483. Gieryn, 'Balancing acts', 221. Macdonald, 'Exhibitions of power', 3. Max-Gerrit von Pein, 'The Mercedes-Ben2 Museum and its visitors', Transport Museums, 15/16 (1988/89), 66-9, at 68. Corn, 'Tools, technologies and context' 241-4, quote at 243; Sue Kirby, 'Policy and politics: charges, sponsorship, and bias', in Lumley (ed.), Museum Time-Machine", 89-101, esp. 95-8; Guillaume de Syon, 'The Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen', Technology and Culture, 40 (1999), 114-19, at 119; Graves-Brown, 'Road to nowhere' 26. E.g. Sharon Macdonald, 'Supermarket science? consumers and "the public understanding of science"', in Macdonald (ed.), Politics of Display, 118-38, esp. 134-8; Sharon Macdonald and Roger Silverstone, 'Science on display: the representation of scientific controversy in museum exhibitions', Public Understanding of Science, \ (1992), 69-87. Ill

Making histories in transport museums 51. Richard Rogers, 'Managing British public opinion of the Channel Tunnel', Technology and Culturep, 36 (1995), 636-40, quote at 639. 52. Rogers, 'Channel tunnel', 639-40, quote at 640. 53. Macdonald, 'Supermarket science', 136. 54. Macdonald, 'Supermarket science', 135-6, and Theorizing Museums, 10,12-13. 55. Pamela Walker Laird, 'The public's historians', Technology and Culture, 39 (1998), 474-82, at 481-2. 56. Macdonald (ed.), Theorizing Museums, 4. 57. E.g. editors' introduction to Karp and Lavine (eds), Exhibiting Cultures, 1-9; Lavine, 'Museum practices', 151-8. 58. 'Last act' Technology and Culture collection, 457-98; Gieryn/Balancing acts', 216. 59. Gieryn,'Balancing acts', 197-228, esp. 211-20. 60. For sympathetic introductions to the literature on the postmodern academic practice of history, see Keith Jenkins, Re-Thinking History, 1991, and On 'What Is History?' From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White, 1995, and Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History, 1997, all Routledge, London. For an introduction to positions in some respects closer to our own, see Lowenthal, Heritage Crusade, 105-26; Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History, Granta Books, London, 1997; Eric Hobsbawm, On History, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997; and at a more advanced level, C. Behan McCullagh, The Truth of History, Routledge, London, 1998. 61. Lowenthal, Heritage Crusade, 118. 62. Laird, 'Public's historians', 482. See also Lavine, 'Museum practices', 151. 63. Kilian T. Elsasser, 'Technology assessment and "edutainment"', in Shorland-Ball (ed.), Common Roots, 159-65, esp. 160-3. 64. Kavanagh, History Curatorship, 82-95; Dream Spaces: Memory and the Museum, Leicester University Press, London, 2000,108-16. 65. B. L. Jackson and M. J. Tattershall, The Bridport Railway, Oakwood Press, Usk, 1998. Cf. the first edition, published as The Bridport Branch, Oxford Publishing Company, Oxford, 1976. 66. E.g. Philip Payton,'"An English cross-country railway": rural England and the cultural reconstruction of the Somerset and Dorset Railway', in Colin Divall (comp.), Railway, Place and Identity, Working Papers in Railway Studies, no. 2, Institute of Railway Studies, York, 1997,17-25. 67. Andrew P. M. Wright, The Swanage Branch, Ian Allan, Shepperton, 1992. 68. Lavine, 'Museum practices', quotes at 152; Ettema, 'History museums', at 63, 78. See also e.g. Kavanagh, History Curatorship, 133; Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections, 203-7. 69. Corn, 'Tools, technologies and contexts', 254. 70. White, 'California State Railroad Museum', 647. 71. Corn, 'Tools, technologies and contexts', 255. 72. Colin Divall, 'Changing routes? the new London Transport Museum', Technology and Culture, 36 (1995), 630-5. 112

Exhibiting social histories of transport 73. Mayr, 'Enola Gay fiasco', 464-5. 74. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections, 24—30, quote at 24. See also, e.g. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985, 249-55. 75. Falk and Dierking, Museum Experience, 107, 110,137,139,154-5, quote at 139; Kevin Moore, Museums and Popular Culture, Leicester University Press, London, 1997, 23-51; Ettema, 'History museums', 77. 76. Corn, 'Tools, technologies and contexts', 255.

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Theories and things: history and the changing role of the object The interpretation of tools and technology in context demands the labors of both museum scholars and their academic colleagues. Joseph J. Corn, in W. Leon and R. Rosenzweig (eds), History Museums in the United States

(University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1989), 258

How should transport exhibitors respond to the challenge of making histories through objects? The study of material culture provides inspiration. Material culture is variously defined as 'material, raw or processed, transformed by human action as expressions of culture', as 'the manifestations of culture through material productions', or, to paraphrase James Deetz, that segment of our physical environment modified through culturally determined behaviour.1 As well as objects, artefacts, machines and devices, these wide definitions include, for example, landscapes, urban spaces, buildings and other fixed structures. There are advantages to this breadth of scope, as will become apparent in Chapter 5 where we analyse heritage transport. But in relation to conventional transport museums it is better to restrict the term material culture to movable 'artefacts constructed by human beings through a combination of raw material and technology'.2 Material culture is just one of the systems of meaning that makes it possible for humans to live socially - we relate to each other partly though the things we make and use. In the words of Jules Prown, one of its most distinguished exponents, the study of material culture is therefore 'the study of material to understand culture'; that is, to uncover a society's beliefs, values, ideas, attitudes and assumptions in either the present or the past.3 Understanding objects in sociocultural terms at any given time (synchronically) is a considerable task in itself, but it is also possible to relate shifts in these meanings to the wider social context, giving a sense of historical change - the province of certain kinds of archaeology.4 Thus by adopting and adapting the techniques used by scholars in these fields, transport museums could become places in which people learn to develop skills in decoding the meanings of objects in the past, learning something of how these made, sustained and changed the lives of individuals and societies. Similar skills are used, usually tacitly, in everyday life, so extending them to historical artefacts such as vehicles is by no means an 114

History and the changing role of the object implausible task. In this chapter we introduce some of the ideas that exhibitors need if such a new generation of object-centred displays is to become reality, and make some suggestions about how this might be done. Material culture in the transport museum We turn first to some of the basic concepts of material culture. Objects, argues Michael Ettema, are 'compelling experiences not because of what they are so much as what they mean*. Although objects can have meaning in more than one sense, many of these are concerned with communication between people. Objects are a chiefly visual category of sign, and the making and decoding of them as such is something that goes on in everyday life. As Ettema points out, people 'identify themselves with the objects they own and use. Our clothing, cars, and furnishings, for example, identify lifestyle, social group, and economic class! This process of identification — of others as well as oneself — is also partly a matter of marking out material similarities with and differences from other people, by comparing and contrasting the objects with which they are associated. Objects thus signify personal and social relationships of all kinds: 'Blue collar uniforms may . . . identify the relationships of equals in the workplace, but when juxtaposed with a manager's white collar and tie they indicate an inequality of status and a relationship of difference.' Finally, things are not only a means of identification, they can also, as signals, direct behaviour because they identify the social circumstances — the places and times - where and when certain kinds of things are expected; Anyone who has attended a formal event without formal dress knows that goods are powerful elements in social life.'5 One advantage of adopting a material culture perspective in transport museums is that smaller and visually less striking parts of collections, like uniform buttons and tickets, could play an important role in exhibitions. In itself a button is easily ignored or overlooked, but as a sign of, for instance, the rule-bound and disciplined workforce of a railway company, it takes on a new and greater dimension. Yet there are challenges as well as opportunities in making histories in this way for as Ettema remarks, 'not all historical issues are materially equal'.6 Partly this is a problem of the choices made by previous generations of curators and collectors, an issue discussed in Chapter 2. There are, for instance, plenty of objects in the NRM collection that could be used to explore the history of railway workers. But many of these, like uniforms and rule books, relate to attempts to subjugate labour to managerial control. There are comparatively few objects associated with workers' organization in pursuit of mutual aid (for instance, through friendly societies) or of opposition to

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management (trades unions). Material markers of individuals' unofficial resistance are almost wholly absent. In the 1950s and 1960s, for example, many British steam footplatemen wore berets or flat cloth caps in preference to the official uniform issue. The NRM has none in its collection. On the other hand, only a few objects are needed to start addressing questions of historical meaning, and suitable things can often be borrowed from other collections. The NRM does not have many banners from railway trades unions, for example, but the Pump House, England's national museum of labour history, does. And anyway perhaps, as Jo Blatti suggests, museums should make more of such absences in their collections to bring out the partiality of all perspectives on the past.7 More of a problem is the inherent difficulty of exhibiting through the medium of things many of the historical topics considered important by academics. Joseph Corn notes the problem generally in relation to industrial museums. He points out that an object-centred exhibition on a topic such as the emergence of industrial research laboratories would be unlikely to be as effective as a book or an article. The problem is not necessarily finding relevant objects to exhibit, but the fact that they would need a lot of textual explanation if they were to evoke and illuminate the exhibition's main themes.8 The argument is readily applicable to transport. Take, for instance, a very controversial debate among transport historians in the 1960s and 1970s concerning the railways' contribution to national economies during the nineteenth century. Even if it were to turn out that some visitors were interested in the subject, it is very difficult to see how they could be inducted into the detailed statistical discussions and disagreements about 'social savings' in the economy simply by displaying objects, for all that one can think of relevant things to put on show — railway rates books and ledgers, goods wagons, clocks, timetables. Likewise, the political, social and economic dynamics of the historical relationship between the provision of public and private forms of transport on the one hand, and the physical growth of towns and cities and their changing social make-up on the other, are too complex and abstract to make a good object-centred exhibition. It is of course precisely this kind of difficulty that has led exhibitors to mount 'books-on-the-wall'. If these abstract and general historical themes are essential to a museum's mission then there is no alternative to using such exhibitionary techniques and others, such as drama, that do not focus on objects. Again, however, the problem is avoidable. There are plenty of historical topics that can be addressed readily - indeed, more readily - through the medium of objects, topics that might appeal to visitors. Corn, for example, suggests that car museums should move beyond displaying vehicles as aesthetic objects and instead focus on them as 'evolving complexes of subsystems and mechanical components'. By 116

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disassembling some cars, displaying the interrelated pieces and explaining how cars are produced, he argues that visitors would - 'through careful and imaginative interpretation' - appreciate better than through any book the relationship between technological and cultural change in much of the twentieth century.9 Indeed, interpreting the micro-histories of a few selected objects might persuade some visitors to explore the more general themes of history by other means outside the museum. ^et, however much one might agree in principle about the desirability of treating museum objects as material culture, exhibitors still face the very significant challenge of learning — or perhaps more accurately relearning - just how to address the material dimensions to social meaning or, to put matters the other way around, the social aspects of things. There is an awful lot riding on that innocent-sounding phrase, 'careful and imaginative interpretation! For one thing exhibitors need to understand thoroughly the many ways in which the 'language' of objects works in contemporary everyday life, for otherwise they will not be able to help visitors develop their own skills in exploring transport's past through things. What is needed is partly greater engagement with the general literature about object 'languages', and partly more (and more thorough) research on how visitors decode transport exhibitions. The largely visual codes of even familiar modern objects are not the same as a spoken or written text. While texts are always ambiguous in some degree, objects are typically much more so: things in everyday life as well as in the museum are polysemic, that is, potentially have many meanings, even though in practice these meanings are limited by the social contexts in which objects are used and perceived. Moreover, as discussed later in this chapter, objects embody several different kinds of social meaning, each made and communicated in different ways. Many are subliminal and hence subconsciously both given and taken.10 All of this means that in addition to the attributes and meanings of an object deliberately introduced by its maker there will also be those 'expressing underlying . . . reflections of the cultural belief structure of the object's creator'.11 Revealing the full range of these meanings is a skill that has to be worked at, both by exhibitors and visitors. The challenges of communicating through objects in a museum multiply as one attempts to make intelligible the foreign country of the past. Here transport museums can learn from the experience of other museums that have already grappled with the problems of communicating across cultural boundaries of space and time. Many commentators argue that there is a degree of commonality to human experience of objects, and that this provides a way of starting to build a bridge between visitors' own time and that of the historical producers and users of things. Yet while certain experiences remain more or less constant, it is wrong to assume that 117

Making histories in transport museums simply displaying an object will invoke the kind of experience it would have done in the past. As Prown notes, the very fact that modern observers live in a very different culture from that of the past means it is impossible to respond to and interpret the object in exactly the same way as did the fabricating society, or any other society that may have been exposed to it and reacted to the object during its history and peregrinations.12 Thus getting museum visitors to understand objects' historical meanings implies going beyond the evidence of the object itself.13 As Ludmilla Jordanova remarks, we ultimately learn about the past 'not by spuriously re-experiencing it', but by considering the many different kinds of evidence from which one gains can understanding which inevitably has a strong intellectual, that is abstract component'.14 Essentially exhibitors need to construct displays that show continuities and differences between the present and the historical contexts in which objects were originally used and understood. Comparing and contrasting vehicles and other transport artefacts from the present with those from the past is one way (and perhaps the only way) of helping visitors appreciate a sense of historical change through material culture. But before they can mount displays of this kind exhibitors themselves need to know much more about the meanings historically embodied in transport objects and how these were, and are, communicated. Technology and objects: the shortcomings of transport historiography The difficulties of treating historical objects as material culture are compounded by the comparative lack of attention given by material culturists to the past; even archaeologists made little effort to study the social meanings of things until the coming of post-processual archaeology in the 1980s.15 Academic transport historians are not much help, despite their emphasis on technology. Technology is, of course, concerned partly with things - with artefacts, objects, devices and machines - and its historians often advocate the use of objects as primary evidence. But they rarely follow their own prescriptions, leaving the analysis of history through things to their colleagues in museums and elsewhere.16 So it is in the realm of transport, but very little of this research treats objects as signs, or bearers of meaning. In particular the value of archaeological work is greatly lessened by the fact that, with the partial exception of the maritime sphere, industrial archaeology still treats only a very narrow range of meaning. Much of it is more concerned with conservation than with elucidating the social parameters of industrial development.17 It is worth spending a few moments discussing the shortcomings of

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transport historians, particularly since we suggested in Chapter 3 that their work is of value in other ways. They do give considerable attention to technology, more than most historians, and they do so because to neglect this dimension of transport means running the risk of drawing nonsensical conclusions. In the 1960s, for example, some economic historians tried to develop detailed quantitative estimates of the contribution the railroads made to the economic growth of the USA. These studies involved certain counterfactual arguments, arguments about what would have happened to the economy if railroads had not been built and a combination of inland waterways and roads had taken on their transport functions instead. This scenario was thought worth exploring because the cost per ton-mile of carrying goods by American waterways was less than that by rail. But, as Robbins remarked, the idea was, in practical terms, 'ludicrous'. The technical requirements of inland waterways in areas of minimal water supplies like the western deserts would have pushed the cost of transport way beyond anything that could have competed with railways.18 So even when they wanted to focus on the economic effects of transport, historians cannot afford entirely to ignore technology. But unfortunately for all their subtle analyses of transport's 'impact' on society, historians of transport rarely think very deeply about the ways in which technological things came to embody social meaning, and how the interplay between these objects, individuals and social structures changed. Most transport specialists share with other scholars of the social sphere an understanding (usually tacit and deep-rooted) of technology as a black box, as something which develops according to an autonomous logic, a logic left to the internalist historians of Chapter 2. The social 'inputs' to and 'outputs' from the black box are what interest most historians, not the inner workings or the social meanings of the box itself. This is all a matter of degree, of course, and it begs all sorts of questions about how the black box is defined. Nevertheless, as a generalization few transport specialists integrate social analysis with a detailed understanding of how technology works and changes, and what it means.19 The parallel exhibitory narratives discussed at the end of Chapter 3 — highly interpreted social narratives on the one hand, with formalist displays of objects on the other - are the public face of historians' black-boxing of technological things. This black-boxing has another deleterious effect on the understanding of the relationship between transport history and material reality. It tends to encourage (although it does not imply) a view of social change as something that is determined by technology. Some historians have for example ascribed the growth of suburbs between the world wars to the mobility and flexibility resulting from the fact that cars and 119

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motorbuses enjoyed a freedom from fixed routes. Technological change did of course have a part to play in suburbanization, but it was not the only factor. Municipal and central government politics and economics, theories of health and poverty, the aspirations of families and individuals, and land values are only a handful of the other factors involved. On the other hand, it would be equally wrong to assert that technologies are all socially neutral, that they may be put to whatever goals society decrees. As we discuss in the next section, technologies can be designed so that their material form opens particular social options and forecloses others.20 Transport historiography is moving in directions that might prove helpful to exhibitors. Cultural historians, for example, give increasing attention to the ways in which transport and travel were represented in works of visual art and other media such as music and novels. Stephen Daniels, for instance, is but one of several scholars to deconstruct the many layers of meaning in J. M. W Turner's sublime painting Rain, Steam and Speed - the Great Western Railway, while Sean O'Connell uses images of the car in visual art, novels and films to discern a wide range of attitudes to motoring in Britain before the Second World War. Clearly the emphasis here is on decoding secondary 'texts', about understanding the historical representations of technologies rather than comprehending the objects themselves. (There is of course a close relationship between the two tasks, and the evidence needed for such understanding might prove useful in exhibitions that concentrate on three-dimensional things.) But other scholars are also concerned with technological objects, broadly conceived. Thus, for example, Julie Wosk draws attention to the use by designers of railway stations, particularly before about 1840, of ornamentation redolent of classical architecture. She argues that this practice was intended to legitimize the new technology in the eyes of a society that, as a consequence of industrialization, was experiencing disorientating and bewildering reconfigurations of old ways of visual understanding. Indeed, as other scholars point out, such decoration was found on many railway locomotives in Britain, the USA and elsewhere during that period.21 We shall return to this example shortly. Despite these promising trends, we conclude that while transport historiography is useful to exhibitors as background knowledge, little of it can be applied directly to object-centred exhibitions. A more valuable scholarly resource for this purpose is a body of work developed since the 1980s - the social contruction of technology, or social contructivism for short. This examines how technological things embody social meanings, and how these meanings in turn play a role in making and remaking social life.

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History and the changing role of the object Social construction of technology Social constructivism embraces a wide range of sometimes warring schools of academic writing. But despite the many and sometimes sharp theoretical differences between them, social constructivists agree that technologies should be understood as sociocultural phenomena, that is, as shaped by and shaping the wider societies in which they were conceived, designed, made, used and discarded. Drawing on the extensive literature of the 1980s and 1990s, Steven Lubar, for example, argues that technological things are products 'not only of economic or scientific or material forces but also of the social and cultural needs of their makers and users'. Hence objects should be understood in broadly the same terms as any other aspect of culture - by looking at the ways in which they were made, intentionally or not, as bearers of meanings, and how these meanings were communicated and received by people in particular social contexts. In so doing, narrow technical analyses of artefacts become embedded in wider and more important issues of history, such as the nature of technological change, knowledge, creativity and design, or that of the relationship between technological and scientific knowledge and practice, and how in turn these relate to still broader debates over social and cultural change, class, ethnicity, race and gender.22 Social constructivist analyses of the past are not simply a combination of the internalist historiography discussed in Chapter 2 with the approaches to social history raised in Chapter 3. Social constructivism rejects, for instance, the belief shared by these schools of thought — at least in their extreme forms — in the autonomous development of technology. But most social constructivists do not go to the other extreme: technologies are not merely passive reflections of social forces, and neither an artefact's physical characteristics nor, perhaps more surprisingly, its socio-cultural meanings can be understood wholly in sociological terms. Objects' materiality is an important part of what marks them as a distinctive system of meaning. At the most obvious level, the laws of engineering and physics constrain how a technological object is conceived and designed, how it is constructed and what it looks like, how it can be used, and thus - as discussed in more detail later in this chapter - how it can act as a signifier. There is nevertheless a degree of flexibility within these material constraints, and it is here that sociocultural factors can come into play, influencing the ways things are understood and conceived, and thus designed, made and used. There is, for example, no one way of designing an aeroplane, even when its basic job, as a vehicle for flight, is clearly understood. Indeed there have been aircraft that although perfectly capable of flight and arguably more efficient than existing ones did not pass beyond the experimental stage because of social factors. For example the

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Cessna C137 was a light twin-engined propeller aircraft with the engines mounted longitudinally, one at the front and one at the rear of the fuselage. This gave the plane an unusually high degree of lateral stability in case of the failure of one engine. But the plane was a commercial flop because it did not fit the macho image thought important by one group of would-be users, male pilots: it was 'too' safe. Other promising designs never made it beyond the earliest of sketches on the drawing board because they simply did not look like aircraft 'should'; the engineers' imagination was circumscribed in some degree by existing traditions of design.23 A technology's social meanings - whether, for instance, it is a 'plane for wimps' - are then a product of the thing itself and of attitudes about it. It is therefore wrong to try to identify any one 'correct' meaning. For instance, a jumbo jet may be an object of technological wonder or awe, or one of huge environmental extravagance and damage, depending on one's point of view. (To some people it might be of all of these at once.) It is the consensus of a social group that establishes meaning, and there can be as many meanings as there are social groups to sustain them. Moreover, the views of any particular group can change, or the group itself might dissolve as its members come to disagree over the meaning of a technology. Meanings have histories, and scholars must be sensitive to the shifts in social structures and groups that help to explain them.24 Questions concerning the relative power of social groups occupy a central place in social constructivism. As the example of the jumbo jet suggests, the meanings of things may be contested; social groups can hold opposed interpretations of any technology. Such groups often try to out-manoeuvre — 'compete' or 'negotiate' with — one another to try to ensure the dominance of their way of understanding (quite literally) things. There is, in the sense of the term 'polities'employed in Chapter 3, a politics to things since the ability to 'fix' their reading, to impose one's own meaning, is to have power.25 Although social meanings can change without any alteration to the physical design or the use of a technology, the converse is also true: shifting attitudes are sometimes reflected in the materiality of a thing - its shape, form, materials, ornamentation, structure, function and so on. Take the historical example of the bicycle. For many young men in the late nineteenth century a bicycle was a machine to demonstrate sporting prowess and nerve, while for women (and older men) it became, among other things, a form of rational exercise. These various meanings led to differing ideas about the appropriate design of bicycles. For many years young men preferred the high-wheeled bike now known as the pennyfarthing, precisely because it was dangerous, fast and required high levels of skill to ride. The dominance of this social group, their ideas about 122

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cycling and what made for a good bicycle is reflected in the historical name for the penny-farthing, the 'ordinary'. Sensing that this was the main market for bikes, most manufacturers chose to build and sell ordinaries, thereby helping to maintain their dominant position. Yet for the very same reasons that young men preferred the ordinary, most women rejected it. Instead they tended to opt for the equal-wheeled, chain-driven 'safety' when this became available because, for one thing, it better suited their long, cumbersome dresses. There matters might have rested, each group using different versions of the same basic technology, had it not been for the invention of the pneumatic tyre. This had advantages for both groups: a more comfortable ride for women and older men, greater speed for young men. Combined with certain other detailed changes, the safety bicycle equipped with pneumatic tyres became the faster machine and most young men, valuing speed above all else, adopted it and abandoned the ordinary. The tacit alliance between the two social groups brought a comparative stability to bicycle design (what sociologists call closure) in the early twentieth century, even while each group maintained different notions of the bicycle's meaning.26 This example hints at the advantages of looking at the whole lifecycle of a technology. Broadly speaking, since the 1980s the scholarly study of technology has shifted from a focus on design and manufacture (the paradigm of production), through a concern with the uses made of things and how they are perceived or understood by society (the paradigm of consumption), to an emphasis on the complete lifecycle; from conception, through design, the selection of materials, production, distribution and use, to redundancy. Robert Gordon, for instance, discusses the 'backward linkages' relating to an object's origin in the exploitation of natural, human and social resources and the 'forward linkages' relating to its direct uses by individuals, to the wider interaction with those who are not immediate users, and to the effect on the natural environment. Similarly, David Kingery emphasizes the importance of seeing artefacts as part of a technological system embracing the social processes of 'materials acquisition and distribution, design, manufacturing, product distribution, reception, perception and use, as well as various possible reuse and discard technologies'.27 Attending to this entire lifecycle rapidly brings home the point that the relationship between things, their meanings and social context is very close, the boundary between them very fuzzy: so close and so fuzzy that perhaps the distinction between 'technology' and 'society' should be abandoned. Kingery is a typical exponent. He argues that each of the stages in a technological object's life 'requires human perceptions, human cognition, social organization, and human interactions as well as artifacts for its performance'. This, he argues, is 'more than context; it is an integral 123

Making histories in transport museums part of technology itself. Indeed Kingery looks at the relationship from the other side as it were, arguing that all human activity embraces artefacts and that hence 'technology permeates all human activities and behavior'. This is too strong - material culture is just one among several kinds of meaningful human activity - but social constructivism certainly holds that technological things have an important role to play in shaping social change and hence history. Understanding objects' unique contribution to the making and remaking of social structures, patterns of living and so on demands analysis of the kinds of activities Kingery indicates.28 What kinds of meanings can technological things bear? The examples already given suggest only some of the very wide range of possibilities for, given their intimate relationship to the social 'context', objects can bear almost any meaning. Every one of the sociotechnical activities in an object's lifecycle may involve, for instance, ideological, economic, environmental, emotional, creative or aesthetic meanings in addition to those of a utilitarian or functional nature. And it is important to remember that although meanings are made and sustained by and through social groups, they can only be experienced by individuals. So it makes sense to include people's emotional, or affective, response to things as part of their meaning. What use is any of this to transport exhibitors? As this chapter stresses, technological objects play a role in shaping society because they are meaningful, and they are meaningful because they are fully part of society. Susan Pearce argues that by taking objects and their material properties as the starting point for an analysis of meaning, 'social organization can be "read off" from them as it can from other social texts'.29 Just how far this is true forms the subject of the next section. If visitors are to grasp anything of the dynamics of the past through museum objects, they have to understand what can and cannot be learnt from things. Learning from and learning about transport objects Things can teach about the past - people can learn from them, both as scholars and as museum visitors. They can, for instance, suggest entirely novel questions; present new evidence to support or refute existing arguments; or provide a level of rhetorical support for existing debates that cannot be matched by documentary sources.30 But equally, in order to understand things as bearers of meaning, as signifiers, one needs to learn about them. This will involve finding out more about the society and culture of which a thing was a part than could possibly be discovered from studying it alone. Objects never speak for themselves; decoding

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them to understand what they meant for the people who made and used them 'requires knowing beliefs and perceptions that are external to the object itself'.31 So putting objects back at the focus of transport displays does not imply that visitors will always be able to learn everything they want from studying things alone; by definition, they will not have the knowledge needed to decode objects' meanings. In any history museum interpretation is a necessity, not an option. Although it needs to be treated with some caution, Jacques Maquet's fivefold classification of artefactual meaning makes clearer what can be learnt from examination of any particular kind of object and what, by contrast, needs to be discovered from other sources. His fundamental division is one we have already made, between objects as instruments (or tools) and as signifiers or, in his sense of the term, as 'signs'.32 Decoding objects as instruments and as signs requires two different perspectives. In the former the observer considers the object and draws inferences from its design and its situation in the social and physical environment. In the latter the observer considers the meanings ascribed to the object.

Instruments then are artefacts designed to do something, and their instrumentality - 'a use that is inherent in them' - may be understood independently of the particular society in which they were made. In fact, as the examples earlier in this chapter suggest, this is only true up to a point. Even considered strictly as instruments, objects embody what we have loosely called social meaning; we return to this point in a moment. Maquet goes on to say that the meaning of an object as a signifier- 'what it stands for' — is 'cultural' in the sense that it is 'recognized a part of the collective reality built by a group of people'; this of course is entirely consistent with social constructivism. He distinguishes four senses in which objects bear sociocultural meaning: as symbols by participation; images by similarity; indicators by association; and referents by convention. The degree to which these meanings are tied to a particular culture varies from one kind to another; this list is also a ranking, from the least culturally-specific to the most.33 Instruments Take instruments first. Maquet argues that although any given tool is made in a particular society, and thus 'is made according to the cultural patterns of that society' considered purely as instruments all tools 'may be understood independently of their cultural determinations'. Thus in any society a machine with four wheels and driven by an internal-combustion engine - a car - is a tool for land transport. Any careful observer 'taking 125

Making histories in transport museums the trouble to study the machine could infer its use from its structure and operation'.34 This is reasonable as far as it goes, although it must be remembered that objects have histories; their uses can change. Not all of an object's uses were necessarily intended by the designer or maker, nor are they always obvious just from the thing itself. Thus, to take two examples from the NRM collection: after withdrawal from railway service a passenger coach may be used as a summerhouse, while an old goods wagon can be upended and used as a farm-yard shelter. Similarly, a car is not always a means of transport; between the world wars, small-time American farmers would often jack up the family auto and run a belt off the rear wheels to provide power for farming or domestic machinery.35 Hence study of the artefact alone will not unambiguously reveal all its actual or potential instrumentalities; appreciating how an object was used at any point in its history requires examination of its operation, of how it fitted into its physical and social environments. More of an issue is the distinction that Maquet draws between an instrument's use and what he calls its function. Something worn on the head is a hat, and this instrumentality can be inferred from the object or, at the very worst, by observing how it is manipulated physically (that is, put on someone's head). But this does not reveal its social function whether the hat is being worn, for example, as a prop for entertainment, or a means of social control (the stationmaster's hat as a mark of authority, for instance). The hat's function is specific to a culture, and it may draw upon the dimensions of meaning that we have yet to explore. Similarly, a spinning frame's use is to produce thread, but whether or not it is also a device used by bosses to increase the exploitation of their workers is something that can only be determined by fully investigating the social circumstances of its use. Examining the frame may well suggest its social function, but proving it one way or the other takes one beyond the evidence of the object itself.36 Whether or not the distinction between an instrument's use and its social function is ultimately tenable, the examples earlier in this chapter suggest that the most interesting aspects of tools are socially negotiated. Take for example an instrument's effectiveness, that is, whether it is a 'success' or a 'failure'. Such judgements have to be related both to a thing's instrumentality - the job(s) it was meant to do - and to criteria about what is to count as a job well done. Ideas about use and usefulness are not wholly inherent in objects. Take first instrumentality. Social groups can disagree over the effectiveness of a tool simply because they do not share a common understanding of its use/function. Disagreements over the ordinary/penny-farthing bicycle in the late nineteenth century are one example. Another, more recent example,

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from the NRM collection, is the Advanced Passenger Train (APT), represented by the entire experimental train (APT-E) of 1972 (Figure 4.1) and a power car from one of the three prototype trains (APT-P) of 1979-80. Even casual observation of their streamlined shape and lightweight construction is enough to suggest their use, in Maquet's sense, as a form of high speed land transport. There is also plenty of documentary and video evidence relating to the trains' experimental operation on British Rail (BR) in the 1970s and 1980s to understand much about their uses and something of the ups and downs that led to the project's eventual cancellation in the mid1980s. But can one therefore say unequivocally that the APTs were a failure? No, because different parties to the trains' development were at odds over just what their intended use/function was. For instance one group, the development engineers, conceived APT solely as a high-speed passenger train, while another, BR's business managers in the 1980s, thought that in addition the train (or at least the power units) should be able to haul freight trains at night. By the mid-1980s the business managers were in the position of greater power and scrapped APT-P partly because it was incapable of doing what they wanted. But the project's engineers said that in their terms APT-P was (largely) fit for purpose.37

Figure 4.1 APT-E — British Rail's experimental high-speed train of the 1970s. Photo, National Railway Museum. 127

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Even if an object's use/function is agreed by all parties there can be disagreements over its usefulness or technical efficiency, a concept that straddles the borderlines of technology, economics and other sociocultural realms as well.38 Engineering rarely deals in absolutes. It is always a matter of 'good enough', and just what constitutes this is negotiated. For example, the reliability of motive power in day-to-day service is an important factor influencing the quality of transport services and, ultimately, their profitability. But different social groups can have different ideas about what is 'reliable'. When, for example, most of BR's freight businesses were bought by an American company in the mid-1990s, the latter's engineers thought the rate of locomotive failures in service unacceptable. But BR had been happy with the figure. Despite these important ways in which social factors inform the instrumental meaning of things, some learning about the past is possible from objects. Many writers argue that things are important when the documentary evidence regarding their principles of construction, operation and use is incomplete, or when technological processes cannot be adequately described. Robert Gordon, for example, points out that the designers, producers and users of technology did not always leave written records, and that even when they did texts were often either attempts as reconstructing experiences long past or were written by exceptional individuals promoting a particular political or social cause. By contrast, artefacts are 'a direct link with our technological heritage' (although only, of course, when they have not been restored). Moreover, Gordon argues, technical know-how draws upon a large measure of tacit knowledge, nonverbal thinking not easily recorded in words or even engineering drawings.39 Studying artefacts can help to correct deficiencies in our appreciation of technological knowledge, change and achievement — a common justification for displaying objects in transport museums, particularly in working order. Moreover as David Kingery for instance argues, knowing what, how and why particular methods were used enhances appreciation of the creativity, skills and intelligence of people in the past.40 In-depth knowledge of this kind can be taken from things by analysing their intrinsic characteristics through the techniques of archaeometry. Since the 1980s archaeometry has developed a wide range of sophisticated techniques in, for example, the determination of materials, the study of superficial marks and the engineering analysis of technical form in relation to function. Transport curators have made little use of these methods, however. Materials analysis can reveal the internal structure of artefacts, giving insights into how they were made and used. For example the NRM has a collection of wrought iron and early steel rails manufactured at one works 128

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(Crewe) throughout much of the second half of the nineteenth century, and metallurgical analysis has shown that the iron was heavily contaminated with impurities, probably leading to poor wearing characteristics and a propensity to fail catastrophically in service. Superficial markings can also reveal how an object was made and used. Examination of the Stephensons' docket (1829) has revealed, for instance, that the original locomotive almost certainly did not carry a steam dome, an important device added only after experience in service suggested its necessity. Locomotive components recovered from an 1850s shipwreck off the Scottish coast have added modestly to the understanding of manufacturing techniques; for example, boiler tubes were found to be handmade from rolled brass sheet.41 Engineering analysis uses modern knowledge to work out an object's use, to show how it worked, or to assess the sophistication of the design relative to its technical function. Such analysis need not be of great depth to be interesting. For example, the remains of early iron age (sixth century BC) four-wheeled carriages reveal that despite initial appearances to the contrary, they employed a pivoted front axle, a simple but necessary device for an effective four-wheeled vehicle (without it, a turn can only be accomplished by dragging the front round, a clumsy and inefficient procedure). Similarly, analysis of the sunken remains of a nineteenthcentury horse-powered ferry allowed an estimate of the vessel's speed to be made.42 Archaeometric data is, however, much more valuable when related to an object's social 'context'. For instance, by determining the origins, strength and other properties of materials, archaeometry can provide insights of interest to historians.43 The brass boiler tubes from the 1850s wreck, for example, carry the inscription of a manufacturer's name from Birmingham, demonstrating a hitherto unsuspected connection between two of Britain's leading industrial cities of the time (the sunken engines had been built in Glasgow). Similarly, metallurgical analysis of the NRM rail collection provided useful confirmation of documentary evidence that a scarcity of reliable, hard-wearing rails was a serious constraint on railway engineers for much of the nineteenth century.44 Details of objects' spatial location, distribution and relationships one to another can also be suggestive of social attitudes, values and patterns of behaviour.45 Thus, for example, the fact that, in the earliest days of production, Model T Fords were found chiefly in rural areas of the USA suggests something about the differing attitudes to motorization held by urban and rural societies. Frequently, examining artefacts provokes questions without providing all of the answers; archaeometry is best practised in combination with other ways of exploring the past. This is particularly so when trying to understand the human resources - the individual skills, knowledge, social 129

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organizations and structures - employed in making or using something. It is not possible to find out much about these just by looking at objects, although, as indicated earlier, doing so might suggest hypotheses that can be tested if other kinds of evidence are available. Operating an original artefact, making a replica and then using it, or even building and testing physical or virtual models can also help. Such experimental archaeology has revealed a lot about, for example, the problems of producing reliable steam locomotives in the 1820s and 1830s, and similar lessons have been taken from reconstructions of rowing and sailing ships.46 As the stock of knowledge about historical manufacturing techniques grows, it is more likely that studying any particular object's materials, internal structure and superficial markings will suggest the kind and level of skill needed to make it. Enough is known for example about working brass to suggest that artisans in the 1850s must have been highly skilled to weld the longitudinal seams in boiler tubes. Again, examination of many of the nineteenth-century passenger coaches in the NRM collection confirms the skill and economy of the men who made them. For example, the wooden stretchers that strengthened the vehicles laterally and supported the roof were often bent to a curve by heat treatment rather than being wastefully machine-cut from solid wood, a technique that would also have reduced the stretchers' strength.47 Artefactual evidence is least helpful with regard to the social structures within which a thing was conceived, made or used, although again it can provoke questions and suggest answers which might be confirmed in conjunction with other evidence. Take, for example, the bridges over New York's Long Island parkways. These were designed with a clearance of less than twelve feet (four metres), thus effectively blocking access for high vehicles to whatever lay beyond them - the beaches. But why were they built like this? The artefacts - the bridges - cannot tell. One needs to know, from documentary evidence, oral accounts or both that Robert Moses, the parkways' designer, allegedly wanted to prevent poor people from reaching the beaches. Building low bridges was an effective way of doing this, as at the time buses were the commonest mode of travel among the working class. In this and similar cases, one has to learn more about a thing than one can from it.48 Symbols The balance between learning from and learning about things weighs more heavily in favour of the latter as we move through Maquet's ranking of meaningful things towards the more culturally-specific. Symbols are next in order. A symbol - in Maquet's rather ideosyncratic use of the term - does not 130

hHistory and the changing role of the object stand in an arbitrary relationship with that which it represents; it 'stands for its signified because it participates in the nature of the signified'.49 A car, for instance, symbolizes technical power because it is powerful.50 Maquet reworks Steven Lubar's analysis of three late nineteenth-century steam locomotives, one each from Britain, France and the USA, to develop the point. Although all were conceived to do basically the same job (hauling trains) they were conceived, designed and built differently, consequently ending up looking quite unlike one another. In Lubar's description, the British locomotive looked like a substantial building - very solid, very establishment; French locomotives are of a rational, extremely efficient design that shows off all their scientific improvements; and American locomotives are practical, easy to repair, only superficially decorated.51 Maquet argues that while each locomotive design stands for something else - the abstract qualities of solidity/strength, rationality and efficiency, or practicality - it does so only by partaking of that quality. The British locomotive is solid and strong and thus simultaneously stands for (symbolizes) solidity and strength; the French locomotive is rational and efficient, and thus symbolizes rationality and efficiency; and similarly for the American example; there is a continuity from the machine to the quality - in fact an identity: The locomotive is practical; the practicality is embodied in the locomotive.52 Marquet suggests that some symbolic meanings can be apprehended across cultural boundaries; like tools in their most basic sense, symbols are intercultural because 'most of the meanings ascribed to them are grounded in the human condition as experienced by all of us'. Strength/ solidity, rationality and practicality are all qualities experienced in most cultures. As a consequence when people study symbolic objects they can rely on their own perceptions. But this is only true up to a point. For one thing, all symbols are polysemic and hence the same object can 'trigger different meanings in the minds of those who have had different individual and collective experiences'. Thus symbolic meaning is in some degree culturally specific.53 For example, around the beginning of the twentieth century British engineers characterized American locomotives imported to Britain not as practical but as 'uncouth, assemblages of iron'.54 In order to capture the full range of meanings placed on symbols in the past, scholars (and museum visitors) have to use written, oral or other sources to get inside the minds of the people who originally perceived them. Symbolic meaning can also work at different levels of consciousness. It is perfectly valid to search for symbolic meanings that were not intended or perceived by historical actors. For instance, the locomotives' qualities

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of solidity, rationality and practicality might be understood in the present as symbolizing national characteristics of the countries that built and used them, whether or not engineers, or for that matter any other social group in the past, realized or intended this. These qualities might be wholly unconscious reflections of the deep-set structures of belief of the particular societies in which the engines were built - to be British was/is to be strong; to be French was/is to be rational, and so on.55 No one could discern this from apprehending the objects alone. Images Images are 'objects standing for other things by visual similarity' and thus the relationship between a thing and that which it signifies is, once again, not arbitrary. Visual isomorphism means that cultural outsiders (which of course includes anyone looking back at the past) can usually understand at the denotative level what an image stands for; the pictograms depicting exits, baggage facilities, lavatories and so on commonly found in modern public transport terminals rely on this principle. But comprehending an image's second-order meanings, its connotations, requires more culturally specific knowledge.56 Here we slightly vary Maquet's example in order to maintain the transport theme. As noted earlier, British steam locomotives in the middle decades of the nineteenth century were often decorated in an effort to make the new technology more socially acceptable. Many of these decorations, such as those on the engines' domes and chimneys, were based on motifs from classical Greek architecture, primarily the column. An observer does not need knowledge which is highly specific to a culture to understand that the decorations represented columns since these are a common architectural feature. However, to make the further connection between the decoration/image and classical architecture does require knowledge of a particular culture — one has to know that the columns represented by the decorations were typical of those found in ancient Greece.57 Indicators and referents Indicators are objects associated with social practices or values of which they have become an attribute, a metonymic relationship. As an example Maquet takes cars. In some developing countries travelling by car means that one belongs to a privileged minority of government officials, and so a car indicates power and privilege by association with this group of powerful and privileged users. Similarly in modern industrial and postindustrial societies, certain makes and models of car are associated with social elites and come both to stand for and to confer social prestige. 132

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Historical examples are as easy to come by. In Elizabethan England, for instance, highly decorated horse-drawn coaches were adopted from continental Europe as an indicator of royalty.58 Such meanings are culturally specific. For instance, in industrialized societies merely riding in a car does not indicate high standing. Similarly, at the start of the western Middle Ages the vehicle of prestige and authority was the ridden horse, not the carriage which prior to the sixteenth century was associated with women and others incapable of holding their own in a society dominated by certain kinds of masculine values. Again, to return to the example of mid-nineteenth-century British locomotives, classical architecture both was an attribute of and stood for the wider set of political and social values of ancient Greek civilization. A nineteenth-century observer educated within the British system of elite education could have made this connection since classical Greek culture was then highly prized. But many visitors to transport museums do not have this knowledge, and so such a locomotive has to be interpreted if they are to understand fully the significance of its decoration.59 Referents are even more specific to a particular culture. They are 'signs arbitrarily selected to stand for what they represent, like the words of a language'; one has to know the code in order to understand them. Objects can themselves be referents, although it is far more common for a referential mark to be added to an object.60 Such formal features are commonly found on transport objects. For example in the nineteenth century the men responsible for shunting railway wagons were often barely literate and so instructions were conveyed by markings chalked onto the vehicles. Similarly from the mid-twentieth century many transport operators adorned their vehicles, buildings, staff uniforms and so on with abstract emblems or logos (Figure 4.2). The meaning of these as signs of corporate identity simply has to be learnt. Towards a social constructivist model for object analysis These digressions into social constructivism and semiotics are as yet too abstract to help with the job of making exhibitions. A framework for the analysis of museum objects is needed if visitors are to be helped to decode the historical meanings of transport objects and thus, ideally, to gain some sense of social change. Although no model of object analysis can serve for all things, several of those developed from the late 1980s are potentially useful in transport museums. Common to all is a methodological commitment to starting investigation with the object before turning to other, supplementary sources of evidence such as documentation, photographs, oral accounts and so on. The aim is to encourage observers: whether scholars or 133

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Figure 4.2 Referential markings on the railroad: Chessie System, USA, 1999.

museum visitors - to discard as far as possible preconceived notions about the artefact and to develop a fresh perspective on what is before them. None of this implies, of course, that each and every transport display has slavishly to ape a - or for that matter, any - model of object analysis. All models have to be applied flexibly, partly because certain questions might not be appropriate for particular classes of object, partly because the necessary evidence is not available. Moreover, the various stages of analysis should not be regarded as watertight compartments; information thrown up at a later stage may well be used to provide fresh insights appropriate to an 'earlier' one.61 The model sketched here is largely derived from that of Susan Pearce, although with an additional emphasis on how the various stages of analysis may be related to one another to give a sense of the historical dynamic between objects, their meanings and social groups. The starting point is the object itself and the data that can be had from sensory and archaeometric investigation - its size, weight, shape, colour, texture, superficial markings (whether put there by the makers or through use); the components and materials from which it is made; its construction, and so on. The goal is a full description of the object as it is in the present. The identification of these physical attributes and their relationship 134

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to one another allows an object's technical design to be identified, placing it in a typology of the things with which it shares similar qualities. It is then possible to compare the data obtained from a single object with that from other exemplars of its type.62 Having exhausted the internal evidence of the object, attention then turns to its history which, as stressed earlier in this chapter, stretches from conception and design, through the selection and acquisition of materials, production, distribution, to use, redundancy, possible re-use, discard, and then collection by and display in the museum. Sensory and archaeometric examination of particular objects and others of its type are, of course, relevant to investigating all aspects of an object's history, but other kinds of evidence are also likely to be required. Gathering data on an object's manufacture and uses at various points in its life is essential, but so too is information about the various individuals who made and used it, and of the social groups to which they belonged. Details of an object's physical location and distribution throughout its history are also desirable; the other objects with which something is stored and used can suggest much about its social significance. It is likely that an object's history will have resulted in physical changes, and every effort should be made to identify these. A change in use, for example, often requires major or minor alterations. The museum object will often be the best evidence for such changes, but other sources such as contemporary photographs should also be used to give as full details as possible about changing appearances, structure, materials, and so on.63 Finally there is an object's significance, or social meanings. The ideal is to identify an object's meanings at all points in its life. This can seldom be realized, but the attempt should be made using whatever evidence there is including, naturally, the object itself. The methodological commitment to start with the object is no less important at this stage of the analysis since, as discussed earlier, intrinsic qualities such as visual form can play an important part in the meaning it conveys, whether as instrument, symbol, image, indicator or referent. Of course, not all things are meaningful in all of these ways.64 Searching for social meanings requires observers initially to immerse themselves in the totality of the museum object; in Jules Frown's description, 'the analyst contemplates what it would be like to use or interact with the object'. This empathetic process includes sensory experience of the object, for example by handling, lifting, using, walking around or through, and experimenting with it. Intellectual engagement (either with or without the benefit of prior knowledge and experience) involves consideration of what the object does and how it does it, and what its wider significance is for the individual observer in the present. Emotional responses - perhaps of pleasure, fright, awe, disturbance, 135

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revulsion, curiosity or indifference — are also an integral part of the process that can lead to particular insights when the observer identifies those intrinsic features of the object that precipitated them.65 All of this obviously takes place at the level of an individual's subjective experience, but this does not render it any the less valuable as a means of apprehending the here-and-now meaning of things. Certain checks and balances provide a measure of inter-subjective validity. In the first place the insights drawn from empathetic immersion and analytic reflection should, in Frown's view, be those common to 'most people, on the basis of their knowledge of the physical world and the evidence of their own life experience'.66 Jacques Maquet argues similarly that the subjective element of the apprehension of meaning can be controlled by replicating perceptions among observers. As the example of the nineteenth-century railway locomotives suggests, it is possible to identify those features of an object that suggest its meaning; this too provides opportunities to check for commonalities between observers.67 Nevertheless, as we noted earlier in the chapter, empathy, even when tempered by the rigours of analysis and other inter-subjective controls, has limits as a means of apprehending the meanings of things. Rather, learning about the past through objects requires one to consider them in the context of other kinds of evidence which are grasped intellectually 'Objects can illuminate words; they cannot replace them.'68 Linking the three stages of object analysis is one of the fundamental insights of social constructivism: that an object's meanings depend both on the attitudes of social groups and (in different ways, depending on the kind of meaning) on its physical attributes. As demonstrated earlier, these meanings have consequences for an object's history - whether, for example, it was a success and used for a long time, or a failure and quickly discarded. These meanings, moreover, are fluid, always subject to the possibility of change, and because meanings, social groups and objects are all interrelated, changes in one can have implications for the others. Physical changes to a class of objects - for instance, the adoption of the pneumatic tyre on the safety bicycle - can lead to quite radical shifts in its meaning for particular social groups, for example young sporting men. On the other hand, shifts in social attitudes can leave an object physically unaltered but its meaning changed. For instance, as the safety bicycle became established as a vehicle for macho displays of high speed, the ordinary metamorphosed into the penny-farthing - physically the same machine but now regarded as hopelessly out-of-date. Alternatively, changing attitudes within a social group might result in alterations to objects, bringing their meaning into line with the group's new values. In the early 1970s for instance it was quite commonplace for teenage boys in Britain to modify their shop-bought bicycles - usually fitted with drop handlebars, 136

History and the changing role of the object five- or ten-speed derailleur gears and other accoutrements of 'racing' machines - by removing the brakes and fitting high-set 'cowhorn' handlebars and single, low-ratio gears so that the resulting 'tracker' bikes could be used for off-road displays of skill and daring. The final step in the analysis of a museum object is therefore to bring together all the available evidence about an object's physical condition, its history and changing meanings in order to write, as far as possible, a full account of the mutually constitutive relationship between all three of these elements. Such a social constructivist history is an ideal that will seldom be fully realized for any particular object, and failure does not mean that a thing has no place in an exhibition. But the more that exhibitors know about the social life of the things in their care, the more possibilities there are when it comes to putting them on show. Helping visitors decode meaning How might an exhibition informed by this model of object analysis work? Focusing on just a few objects, or even a single one would be challenging but potentially very rewarding. The physical layout and hence the narrative structure of the exhibition needs to be carefully considered. It would first present the concrete, physical evidence of the object itself and only then allow visitors to consider by stages what it might tell about the object's own history and its social meanings. Supplementary evidence derived from oral, photographic or written accounts would naturally be provided, but not as the first thing visitors encountered. It is useful to start thinking about the information that visitors could obtain and the questions they might be provoked to ask from examining objects. What is it made of? How do its components fit together? What are the surface markings or ornamentation? What was its use? Some of the processes of examination and archaeometric analysis that provide scholars with answers could be mimicked in an exhibition. Sensual exploration is of course one of the most important in terms of engaging visitors' interest; seeing, touching, listening to, tasting, smelling and hearing objects allow something approaching an empathetic appreciation of how the objects were experienced in the past. But visitors also need to be warned that their sensual and affective experiences of artefacts, shaped as they are by their own physical and emotional characteristics and life histories, are never exactly the same as those experienced by people in the past. Here, perhaps, there is scope for surprising visitors, forcing them to reconsider their perceptions of the past by offering evidence of the sometimes very different ways in which people used to experience things - the romance of steam trains soon begins to fade in the face of evidence of the reality of their dirt and danger.

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Sensual exploration needs to be supplemented by a more analytical approach which initially tries to make sense of an artefact's design and superfical markings in relation to its use - the realm of instrumental meaning. What is this object for and why does it look like this? Could it have looked different, and if so how might it have looked? Why does it have this particular colour, texture, weight and size? Why does it bear the markings it does? Once visitors have had the opportunity to describe to themselves an object's physical form and to think about its use, the question whether it has always been like that introduces the idea of an object's history. Some thought about the general appearance and condition in which an artefact is displayed might be all that is needed. In the mid-1980s Berlin's Museum fur Verkehr und Technik pioneered the display of railway locomotives in rusty and dirty scrapyard condition, partly with the intention of conveying a sense of the objects' life of change, development and redundancy. Some motor museums — the Petersen Automotive Museum is one — display crashed cars. These are far from common practices in transport museums, however, and the general assumption among exhibitors (and enthusiasts) is that the original, 'as built' condition of a vehicle is the only one of significance.69 Challenging this assumption could make a powerful exhibition in its own right. Although rarely practical on grounds of cost or, in the case of vehicles, space, a fuller sense of the life cycle of a class of objects could be conveyed by displaying a series of examples each restored back to a different stage in the type's history. This is not a new idea. In the 1960s the Museum of Transport in Glasgow did this with several of the city's so-called Standard tramcars, many of which had been heavily rebuilt, several times over, during 40 or so years of service. Another possibility, particularly suitable for large objects like vehicles, is partial restoration, leaving one part in asreceived condition and returning other sections to their appearance at earlier stages. Railway coaches, for example, often lasted in service for a long time during which their interiors were remodelled to reflect changing uses and fashions, and it would be possible to reflect this in a museum display. The NRM has one passenger coach restored on similar lines; the exterior is painted in the livery of the 1920s while the interior compartments are fitted out with original materials from the mid-1940s when the coach was first restored. There are dangers to this technique though. The artifice must be readily apparent to visitors, which is not the case at the NRM. Most visitors probably assume that the coach is displayed as it was at a single point in its life. More radical changes - for example, the change in use from goods wagon to farmyard hen-house could also be conveyed powerfully by using contemporary photographs. Since an object's history is meaningless without knowledge of the 138

History and the changing role of the object individuals and social groups associated with it, a major challenge is to find ways of encouraging visitors to think about the people who conceived, designed, manufactured or built, distributed, owned, used and were otherwise affected by an object thoughout its life. Transport museums have long used photographs, mannequins or their two-dimensional equivalents to this end, but it might be profitable to think about how more use might be made of objects themselves. A small, mundane and (usually) ephemeral artefact like a travel ticket can, if interrogated carefully, prompt many questions and even yield some information about the people associated with it. Take for example a used printed card Edmondson railway ticket (Figure 4.3). Who thought up the basic design? Who made it? Who made use of the numbers printed at the top of the ticket? Who sold it and on whose behalf? Who cut the small pieces out of it? Who bought the ticket and who used it for travel? Who saved the ticket? Since answers to most of these questions could not be gleaned from the object itself, further objects and other kinds of evidence and interpretive material would have to be provided to give visitors the resources to come to some kind of conclusion. A pair of ticket clippers, for instance, would give clues regarding the small missing pieces of ticket, raising a whole raft of further questions about who used them, and why. The ticket might also be used to warn against 'reading' too quickly the evidence from things themselves. For example, it is quite likely that adult visitors who travelled by train as a child (perhaps to school) but rarely since would see the overprinted 'HALF' on the ticket and assume that it was used by a child (at half fare). In fact, this was not the case; it was used by one of us as a student with a railcard entitling to travel at half fare.

Figure 4.3 The humble Edmondson card ticket. Photo, National Railway Museum. 139

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Asking - and perhaps answering - 'Who?' needs to be associated with 'When?', 'Where?', 'How?' and 'Why?' Why, for example, was the ticket made from cardboard? The choice of one material over another is as socially contructed as that about any other aspect of a technology. A thing's use is a constraint on the material - a ticket made from tissue paper would not be robust enough to stand up to any but the very shortest of journeys - but there are other considerations as well. A material's physical availability is an obvious one, but historically this depended on knowledge of the material's existence and how to get and work it. Considerations of, for example, economy, style and aesthetics may also be important.70 Thus the fact that the ticket was made of thin cardboard might suggest that it had to stand up to a fair amount of handling during its life - as indeed was the case, since Edmondson tickets were printed in large batches, stored in central warehouses, distributed to individual ticket offices, punched at the point of sale, handled, inspected and clipped on a journey before finally being collected at the ticket barrier and returned to a central office for checking. By contrast, many modern railway tickets are made of paper partly because they are handled far less - they are printed at the point of sale and not collected at the journey's end. A ticket or other travel document's meanings are not exhausted by their instrumentality as permits to travel. The material they are made from, their size, shape, and colours, the other objects they are associated with, as well as the referential marks on them, all may play a part in conveying their social significance. Marks such as '1st' are likely to be decoded as referring to the class of accommodation for which the ticket is valid, and hence by implication convey some sense of the social standing of the person who used it. A written label could confirm (or deny) the social distribution of the object as a sign of the consumption of travel, but visitors are perhaps more likely to develop skills in 'reading' material culture if a first-class ticket is put on display with objects such as a leather briefcase, digital mobile phone and palm-top computer, thereby trading on the associations between these and the business people who are among the most common users of modern first-class rail travel. By using a sequence of objects interpreted in this way it might be possible to get visitors to reflect on the similarities and differences between the present and particular periods in the past, thus gaining some sense of historical change. For example, one could start to explore the history of travel between London and Glasgow through the tickets issued for the journey. Indeed, a signifier for the present might not even be a rail ticket - businesspersons are perhaps more likely to travel by air.

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Social constructivist exhibitions: some examples A few museums have mounted transport exhibitions drawing on social constructivist ideas. The story of the nineteenth-century bicycle is something of a favourite, partly because scholars have carried out a detailed analysis on social constructivist lines, and partly because bicycles and components were readily available in collections.71 Both the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit and the Museum of Transport in Glasgow have mounted such exhibitions. However, these displays fail to develop visitors' skills in decoding objects. Rather, they are heavily didactic. Graphic panels carry the narrative burden, introducing ideas about the social meanings of bicycles and how the histories of social groups, their attitudes towards cycling and the bikes themselves related to one another — but the bicycles themselves are largely illustrations of the panels' messages. Visitors have little opportunity to find out for themselves by starting with bicycles and working outwards, as it were, to other kinds of evidence. A temporary exhibition with which one of us was involved, 'Home Truths: The Secret Language of Everyday Things' shown in 1993 at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, tried to incorporate social constructivist ideas while also encouraging visitors to work with the evidence of objects and other media.72 Most of the exhibition used techniques of inversion to encourage visitors to think about the ways in which modern domestic objects convey meaning. Familiar things were put in the 'wrong' context (unpaid bills in a photographic frame placed on a mantelpiece, for example) in order to make explicit the sub-conscious assumptions made in everyday life about the 'correct' meanings of objects. This provided some context for a small historical section which tried to get visitors thinking about the question 'Who decided what things looked like?' by displaying old bicycles. Although the technique of inversion was not used in this part of the exhibition, the exhibition team wanted to focus visitors' attention on the objects and so avoided the use of conventional labels and graphic panels. The exhibitors also wanted to suggest three points familiar from academic analysis. First, that in the late nineteenth century the design of bikes was contingent upon choices made by users and manufacturers. Secondly, that these choices and the associated designs and uses related to certain social groups, for which they held particular meanings. Thirdly, that the dominant conception of what a bike should be like at any particular time was partly a consequence of the relative social power of each of the groups involved. Only three machines were displayed: a modern racing bike, mounted high on the wall as a familar object to attract attention, and on the floor an ordinary/penny-farthing and a safety bicycle from the 1890s. Putting these two machines side by side was meant to suggest that in the 1890s 141

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they were genuinely alternative designs - that at that point there was a degree of flexibility about how a bike could be designed and constructed. Each design was linked to the social group that favoured it by mounting beside each bicycle a cut-out, two-dimensional figure representing a typical member of the group. Thus a heavily dressed, middle-class woman stood by the safety machine, a young man in sporting attire by the ordinary. The meaning each bike had for its social group was suggested by short taped 'speeches', drawn as far as possible from historical sources, 'spoken' by the appropriate cut-out; the same text was permanently displayed in speech bubbles. The woman talked, for instance, about how she enjoyed cycling because of the freedom and exercise it gave her, and how she much preferred the safety bicycle because she found it so much easier to get on and off with her long dresses. At the most obvious level of interpretation there was thus no single 'story of the bicycle'; the visual, aural and written evidence referred directly to individual bikes and was intended to encourage visitors to consider them as bearers-of-meaning. At this level the display enjoyed some success. On the other hand the physical arrangement did not place bicycles firmly at the focus of visitors' attention — it was too easy for them to latch onto the supplementary evidence before they had carefully examined the objects themselves. At another level the exhibition did attempt a narrative of historical change - it tried to convey a sense of the social dynamics that led to derivations of the safety becoming the commonest form of bicycle by the early twentieth century. It did not use didactic explanatory panels but provided different kinds of evidence for visitors to use to work out for themselves what had happened. Recognizing that the entire history of the emergence of the modern bicycle could not be comprehensively displayed, the exhibitors focused on just one crucial change, the introduction of the pneumatic tyre. A single wheel with a solid tyre and another with a pneumatic tyre were put at the centre of the exhibition. With each were associated more talking figures, their 'speeches' illustrating the shifting views of each social group towards this particular component of the bike. Thus sporting young men were heard to be scornful at first about the pneumatic tyre (because it represented feminine values of comfort and safety and seemed likely to have a deleterious effect on speed), then later becoming enthusiastic as they realized that air tyres could in fact mean even faster bikes. The idea was that visitors would use this evidence to gain a sense of how the convergence of opinion between young men, women and manufacturers resulted in the widespread adoption of the pneumatic tyre. In practice few visitors engaged with this aspect of the exhibition. Perhaps they were simply not interested in the story - by contrast many 142

History and the changing role of the object were interested in the bicycles. Perhaps the interrelated dynamics of bicycles, their meanings and their associated social groups was simply too abstract and complex a theme to treat successfully without resorting to the explanatory graphics of a bo ok-on-the-wall. Another example: 'The Garden' Our second example is another with which we were closely involved, and drew upon our experience with 'Home Truths'. The Garden' is a small, permanent exhibition located in the NRM Great Hall and opened in 1996.73 It consists simply of an 1890s passenger coach from the Lynton and Barnstaple Railway, in north Devon, set in a simulated walled garden (Figure 4.4). The exhibition was not based on the model of object analysis outlined earlier, but it did reflect our conviction that visitors would be interested in the coach as evidence about the past. By inviting visitors to examine and consider it, we hoped to excite interest in the reasons why railway vehicles are as they are - to treat them as instances of material culture. The exhibitionary techniques were also to pay due regard to the evidence that most casual museum visitors prefer to deal with concrete rather than abstract ideas; that such ideas are best introduced at a fairly elementary level; and that they are best understood through the use of multi-sensory and multi-media techniques. Developing an engaging form of interpretation meant being clear about the intended audience, but a lack of trained personnel and the small budget for the exhibition (about £2,500/US$4,000) also meant that systematic, front-end evaluation of potential visitors was impossible. However, casual observation over several months, particularly of women and small groups of adults and children, suggested that many were wearied - physically and psychologically - by the technical and aesthetic 'glories'of much of the rest of the Hall. These people became the principal audience. Yet we had no wish to alienate railway enthusiasts, and particularly those followers of the Lynton and Barnstaple Railway. For this specialist audience (the railway has its own special-interest group) the coach has long been significant as the most complete relic of rolling stock to have survived the line's closure in 1935. This symbolism had been greatly strengthened when the NRM acquired the coach (Lynton and Barnstaple No. 2) in 1982, putting it on public display some ten years later. Putting these desiderata together provided a short list of aims for the exhibition. First and foremost, the coach was to be the focus, interpreted as material culture particularly in terms of its changing uses. Secondly, the coach's physical environment and interpretive themes should engage causal visitors while also providing something for the

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Figure 4.4 'The Garden' at the National Railway Museum, 1996. Photo, National Railway Museum.

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more knowledgeable. Thirdly, the principal themes were to be accessible to visitors without the need to read English well (thereby in particular encouraging young children to use the exhibit). The setting for the coach was suggested by its history. Having been built for the Lynton and Barnstaple Railway's opening in 1898, it served unspectacularly for the next 37 years until the line's closure in 1935. A local clergyman saved Southern Railway 6692 (as it had become in 1923) from destruction by buying it for use as a summer house in his garden. There it remained, passing through several changes of ownership, until finally secured by the NRM nearly half a century later. The museum wanted the coach partly as an example of technical progress in the design of late nineteenth-century coaching stock. A subsidiary reason was that the museum lacked any examples of passenger stock from the narrow-gauge light railways of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — technically successful but economically rather dismal attempts to extend railways into remote or geographically difficult parts of the country.74 The initial assumption both within the museum and among railway enthusiasts was that 6692 would eventually be restored and displayed as a railway coach in its heyday. Such an assumption was understandable, for most large railway relics saved in Britain since the nineteenth century had been quickly restored by their owners. The NRM was heir to this tradition, which had been strengthened in the 1950s when the British Transport Commission's first curator, John Scholes, had made restoration to original appearance (and sometimes operating condition) official policy.75 However, financial problems meant that nothing was done until the early 1990s when conservation was undertaken to allow the vehicle to be put on display as part of a small formalist exhibition of narrow-gauge vehicles in the Great Hall. Although the unrestored vehicle stood in sharp contrast to the surrounding exhibits, the object label made it clear that conventional philosophies of restoration and display still applied. It drew attention to the vehicle's technical characteristics and indicated that the coach's condition might be of interest as an example of the challenge faced by the museum's restorers. Indeed one major component of the coach was restored in the early 1990s (the wheels and supporting frame at one end the bogie) before the curatorial team had second thoughts, partly as a result of a debate within the NRM about the relationship between conservation, restoration and interpretation of artefacts. Influenced by the theoretically informed practices developed by museums outside the transport sphere, curators ruled out further restoration, largely because this would have involved considerable destruction of the physical evidence of the object's history.76 It is doubtful whether anything very novel or significant can be learnt from the coach from even the closest of archaeometric examination, not 145

Making histories in transport museums least because for such a minor railway the Lynton and Barnstaple vehicles are extraordinarily well documented. But 6692's largely authentic condition promised much as a way of exciting and engaging visitors' imagination. The general condition of the vehicle, for example, readily suggested that it was old and had a history before entering the museum. Peeling paintwork revealed layers of different colours, suggesting the care that had gone into maintaining the vehicle over the years, and perhaps hinting at changes in ownership and later neglect. The interiors were shabby but very largely dated from the coach's use as a railway vehicle. Because 6692 had two classes of accommodation (first and third), the interiors suggested a good deal about the different kinds of people who used the coach. The key to engaging people's interest lay partly with the object's setting. Putting the coach in a semblance of a walled garden (no attempt was made to reproduce the rectory garden) served several purposes. The wall defined a space that was distinct from the rest of the Great Hall, shielding the relatively small vehicle from the aura of the massive, heavily restored locomotives that fronted it. Gaps in the wall created new, more tantalizing sight-lines that allowed visitors to glimpse the coach from the body of the Great Hall, drawing attention to an object that was easily overlooked given its peripheral location. Once inside the space, the provision of garden furniture — seats and tables — encouraged visitors to linger and use the interpretive material scattered around about. Creating a semi-enclosed space was also intended to encourage visitors to decode the exhibition differently from the surrounding exhibits. Finally, of course, it reflected the use to which the coach was put for the greater part of its life before it entered the museum, thus drawing attention to the fact that an object's use may vary considerably over its lifetime. Little effort was put into drawing attention to particular aspects of the coach, apart from opening the door to the first-class compartment so that people could look in. (The fragile nature of the furnishings meant that perspex screens had to be made to protect the door and to stop people entering the coach, while lack of money prevented the more spartan third-class compartment being opened up.) Supplementary interpretive material was, however, provided, primarily to reinforce the fundamental point that 6692 had led a varied life. It consisted of two photograph albums and a couple of short commercially published books about the railway, all left lying on the tables within easy reach of the seats. One of the albums contained 14 dated photographs of 6692 drawn from its history until its arrival in York. Although constrained by the original photographers' intentions and compositions, shots were selected to indicate the changing uses of the vehicle. There was, for instance, an official works photograph taken by the builders for the purposes of record, advertise-

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meat, and perhaps even commemoration, along with other images recording people's recreational use of the coach in the 1930s, both as a means of travelling on the railway and as a summer house. Two important transitional points in the object's history were marked: its sale in 1935 and the change from summer house to museum piece (although not initially any of its status as an exhibit - these were added later). The second photograph album contained pictures of many of those responsible for producing the exhibition. This served a double purpose. First, to acknowledge the contribution of sponsors and volunteers in a more public fashion than usual, and secondly, by claiming authorship of the exhibition, to emphasize that it was itself an artefact, a product of a particular group of museum workers. The two books helped to reinforce these messages, as well as providing some contextual reading for those interested in the Lynton and Barnstaple Railway, past and present. One, a short history of the line, contained all the technical details that enthusiasts in particular might otherwise have missed — the ultimate labels, as it were. The other book — which only became available as the exhibition was being developed - drew together many anecdotes from former users, workers and those who merely knew the line, thus giving a flavour of personal memories to the exhibition.77 One criticism that might be levelled at 'The Garden' is that it did not convey much of a sense of the coach's meaning beyond the instrumental, and that even in this regard the interpretation reflected a conventional, linear narrative of change - the coach as first an industrial product, then an operating vehicle, next a summer house, and so on. But one has to start somewhere: a story embracing notions such as redundancy and altered uses is a little out of the ordinary as far as the NRM and most transport museums are concerned. It is true, however, that little thought was given to other social meanings that 6692 might have embodied. How, if at all, did it historically function as a symbol, an image, an indicator, or a referent - and how does it work as such in the present day? A moment's reflection throws up some of the meanings the coach must have had for different social groups in the past. For instance, for the railway workers the coach was (presumably) variously a source and sign of toil, danger, remuneration, job satisfaction and enjoyment; for day-trippers, a place of class distinction, relaxation, anticipation (of the day's outing), contemplation (at day's end), and perhaps disappointment and frustration when the weather or mechanical breakdown derailed carefully laid plans. It would be possible to rework parts of the exhibition to begin to deal with these points without resorting to a heavily didactic book-on-thewall, although the evidence of this particular object is not likely to yield much. There are referential marks on the coach, such as its running number (6692) and designations of class, and more emphasis could be put 147

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on these. On the whole, though, more supplementary forms of evidence are needed. It is just possible - although increasingly unlikely - that a few older vistors have their own personal memories of the line that they might be persuaded to share with others. Memories passed down from one generation to the next are more likely. A more varied use of photographs might be another way forward. One or two of the photographs in the original exhibition showed in some detail people's interaction with 6692 (Figure 4.5), and at the very least more like these (and the Lynton and Barnstaple was thoroughly photographed, at least in the last decade or so of its life) might spark visitors' curiosity about how different people in the past felt about the coach. Of course all visual images are themselves open to multiple interpretations and this throws up the thought that visitors might 'misinterpret' the photographs.78 But here the commonality of certain forms of human experience is obviously relevant. Consider for instance Figure 4.6. The expressions of the two (historical) visitors convey emotions about the occasion of the photograph and its setting (6692) that are likely to be understood by most people. Careful use of more contemporaneous photographs of this kind could also suggest to visitors that at any given point in the past, different social groups held various views about the coach's significance. Indeed, the point could be brought right into the present by inviting groups of visitors to contemplate their own feelings about the coach, recording them with a Polaroid camera, and posting the result(s) in yet another album for the edification and amusement of those who come after them. None of this could be said to offer a scholarly delineation of the coach's history. In particular, it might be argued that while 'The Garden'enjoyed a measure of success in suggesting answers to the 'What?', 'When?' 'How?' and perhaps even the 'Who?' of 6692's past, it did little to tackle the 'Why?' Why, for instance, did the coach become a summer house in 1935? Some basic answers can be gleaned from the photographic record. The railway's closure, the immediate reason for the sale, was comprehensively recorded and some relevant photographs were displayed. And for the truly curious, more hints and evidence were to found in the written history of the line. But to ask for much more would be to misconstrue the exhibition's purpose. It was not a didactic exercise in displaying a particular account of 6692's history, far less an attempt to represent the entire set of social relations within which it was built, used, reused, collected and displayed. It was just a way of introducing visitors to the idea that things have histories that are tied up in interesting ways with the people who made and used them. In 1999 the exhibition was revised slightly with the aim of giving visitors an opportunity to make links between social groups, meaning 148

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Figure 4.5 Trippers on the Lynton and Barnstaple Railway, 1935. Photo, National Railway Museum. 149

Making histories in transport museums

Figure 4.6 Visitors in the first-class compartment of No. 6692 in 1939. Photo, National Railway Museum.

and an object's physical form. Visitors were now invited to reflect on the rather different fate of a sister vehicle, Southern 6693. This coach was also saved from scrapping in 1935 when it was bought by a farmer and left on the route of the old railway, later being used as accommodation for evacuees from the city during the Second World War and then as a henhouse. The subsequent contrast in the two objects' histories makes the link between social meaning and physical design and form. In 1959, 6693 was bought by the Ffestiniog Railway, a heritage line in north Wales, which saw it as a kit of parts from which to build an operating coach (a buffet car).79 The rebuilt coach bore no more than a passing resemblance to a Lynton and Barnstaple vehicle but in the mid-1990s the railway, by then more mindful of the coach's history, heavily rebuilt it to something like the original design. With the cooperation of the Festiniog Railway, which supplied photographs of the various rebuilds, the story of 6693 was told by means of a second album. 150

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This exhibitionary tactic might have even more appeal if visitors were to be given a say in the future of 6692. With the addition of a simple voting paper, the NRM could ask visitors whether or not 6692 should be rebuilt and 'restored'. Offering such a choice might encourage visitors to reflect upon the NRM practices of display, conservation and restoration in the rest of the building. Even in its modified form 'The Garden' does not employ all of the ideas and techniques for which we have argued in this chapter. As far as we are aware, no transport museum has yet attempted that. Nonetheless, casual observations over some years suggest that 'The Garden' is at least modestly successful as a place of respite and repose from the rest of the Great Hall. Adults and children, either on their own or together, sit on the benches and pour over the photograph albums, while the odd enthusiast avails himself of the ultimate label, the history of the Lynton and Barnstaple Railway. The collection of anecdotes seems to be even more popular, judging by the number of times it has been stolen. Perhaps the most telling remark is one heard more than once from the mouths of children: 'Oh, look isn't it old?'. In fact, the coach at the focus of 'The Garden' is, at a little over one hundred, a comparative youngster in the NRM: it simply wears its years more honestly. Clearly there is plenty of scope for the development of exhibitionary techniques that encourage visitors to examine and decode objects, helping them to make up their own minds about the past on the basis of objects and other kinds of evidence. Perhaps this is more important even than trying to display what will inevitably be a watered-down version of the latest academic historiography. Saying this is not to abandon an educational role for exhibitions. Helping visitors to enhance their own reading of the past through objects is both educational and valuable in its own right. Indeed, if transport exhibitors put more thought into furthering this goal they might also encourage more visitors to find out about the past after they leave the museum. From the history of things to history through things: the Vasamuseet While transport museums should be much more concerned with helping visitors to decode the meaning of objects, they should not lose sight entirely of the kind of wider historical themes and narratives discussed in Chapter 3. Exhibitions that are both popular and that subvert received wisdoms about the past need to attend to more than the micro-histories of things and their immediate social 'context'. 'The Garden', for example, focuses on the history of one object to interest visitors in the social dynamics of the past, but by comparison with the insights offered by a more conventionally interpreted display it does little more than gesture at 151

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changes in wider society. We have already argued this is probably a limitation of object-focused displays - material culture is, after all, only one of the many different systems of meaning informing social change - and only experiment will tell how far this kind of approach can be pushed so that the story of a few objects becomes a microcosm of that of society, or at least important parts of it. Perhaps transport museums that wish to exhibit the wider, more abstract themes of social history will have to continue to use other methods of display. Nevertheless the extraordinary exhibition that has been created at the Vasamuseet suggests what can be achieved in communicating about the history of a society when the object — a ship, the Vasa — at the focus of an exhibition is imaginatively interpreted. It is probably no accident that it is a maritime object that is so well displayed since the archaeology of this field, especially in Europe, is considerably more sophisticated than that of most other modes of transport.80 The \fasa is a seventeenth-century warship, built in Stockholm, which sank on its maiden voyage in 1628 before it had left the harbour. It rested undisturbed on the sea bottom until raised in 1959. After the inevitable 30 years of conservation and preparation it was moved into a new purpose-built museum around 1990. The impact of the display is amazing. One enters the relatively dark space and is dwarfed by the restored vessel. The ship and the achievement represented by its conservation and presentation are at first overwhelming. But it is the careful interpretation which continues to impress. One can take just so much of the spectacle of this wonderful vessel — yet whenever one turns away it is to find another smaller-scale but nevertheless engaging display which interprets some aspect of the larger story. There is a constant interplay between the object and these supporting stories. The visitor is bounced continually to and fro; first captivated by the vessel itself, then turning to a smaller display which answers some questions but — at the same time — encourages the visitor to return again to the vessel to confirm new knowledge or test learning. Like other ship recoveries, the 1/frsa has yielded up large numbers of small objects, each of which contributes through its own fascinating story to the wider historical themes of the exhibitions. But the lessons the lisa's display offers to other types of transport exhibition are powerful. Most transport collections include material beyond the vehicles themselves but what is striking about the lisa's supporting displays is partly their variety - object-rich, multi-media, conventional film, computer-based interactive. Each, however, uses the Vasa and its context to illuminate another aspect of seventeenth-century life. And herein lies the real achievement. The visitor leaves with some understanding not just of seventeenth-century ships: international politics, mercantile trading patterns, shipbuilding 152

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skills, life in early modern Stockholm - all are revealed through the medium of the Vasa and its supporting material. In so doing, the object transcends its reality as a transport artefact and becomes (as it should do) a window on the wider world of the past. The irony is that when transport museums succeed they cease to be transport museums. Perhaps that should be the chief measure of their achievement.

Notes 1. Jules D. Prown,'Material/culture: can the farmer and the cowman still be friends?', inW. David Kingery (ed.), Learning from Things: Method and Theory of Material Culture Studies, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC, 1996, 19-27, at 21, and 'The truth of material culture: history or fiction?', in Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery (eds), History from Things: Assays on Material Culture, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC, 1993, 1-19, at 1; James Deetz, quoted in Susan M. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections: A Cultural Study, Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1992, 5. 2. Susan M. Pearce, 'Museum studies in material culture', in Susan M. Pearce (ed.), Museum Studies in Material Culture, Leicester University Press, London, 1989, 1-10, at 3, and Museums, Objects and Collections, 167-8. 3. Prown,'Truth of material culture', 1. 4. Prown, 'Material/culture', 19-27; Ian Morris, Archaeology as Cultural History: Words and Things in Iron Age Greece, Blackwell, Oxford, 2000, 3-33. 5. Michael J. Ettema, 'History museums and the culture of materialism', in Jo Blatti (ed.), Past Meets Present: Essays about Historic Interpretation and Public Audiences, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC, 1987, 62—85, at 78-9. See also Pearce, Museum Studies, 1-10, and Museums, Objects and Collections, 165-91. 6. Ettema, 'History museums', 81. For further discussion of this point, see Kevin Moore, Museums and Popular Culture, Leicester University Press, London, 1997, 39-41. 7. Jo Blatti, 'Past meets present: field notes on historical sites, programs, professionalism, and visitors', in Blatti (ed.), Past Meets Present, 1-20, at 4-5. 8. Joseph J. Corn, 'Tools, technologies and contexts: interpreting the history of American technics', in Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig (eds), History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1989, 237-61, at 256-7. 9. Corn, 'Tools, technologies and contexts', 257-8. 10. Editor's introduction to Kingery (ed.), Learning from Things, 1-15, esp. 1-5; Prown, 'Material/culture', 19-27; Ian Hodder, 'Post-modernism, post-structuralism and post-processual archaeology', in Ian Hodder (ed.), The Meaning of Things: Material Culture and Symbolic Expression, Harper Collins Academic, London, 1989, 64-78, at 69-73; Ettema, 'History museums', 82. 153

Making histories in transport museums 11. Kingery (ed.), Learningfrom Things, 4. 12. Jules D. Prown,'Mind in matter: an introduction to material culture theory and method', in Susan M. Pearce (ed.), Interesting Objects and Collections, Routledge, London, 1994,137. 13. Prown,'Material/culture', 21-2; Ivan Karp,'Culture and representation', in Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (eds), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and the Politics of Museum Display, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC, 1991,11-24, at 16-22. 14. Ludmilla Jordanova, 'Objects of knowledge: a historical perspective on museums', in Peter Vergo (ed.), The New Museolog)!, Reaktion Books, London, 1989, 22-40, at 25. 15. Daniel Miller, 'Why some things matter', in Daniel Miller (ed.), Material Cultures: Why SomeThings Matter, UCL Press, London, 1998, 3-21; Introduction to Lubar and Kingery (eds), History from Things, viii-xvii; Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections, 196; Ian Hodder, 'Post-modernism', 64-78; Thomas J. Schlereth, 'Material culture research and North American social history', and Gaynor Kavanagh, 'Objects as evidence, or not?' both in Pearce (ed.), Museum Studies, 11-26,125-37; Prown, 'Material/culture', 19. 16. Joseph J . Corn, 'Object lessons/object myths?: what historians of technology learn from things', in Kingery (ed.), Learning from Things, 35-54, and 'Tools, technologies and contexts', 255-6; Robert B. Gordon, 'The interpretation of artifacts in the history of technology', in Lubar and Kingery (eds), History from Things, 74-93, esp. 88-91; T.J. Schlereth,'History museums and material culture', in Leon and Rosenzweig (eds), History Museums, 300, 311—14; Steven Lubar, 'Learning from technological things', in Kingery (ed.), Learningfrom Things, 31—4. 17. Marilyn Palmer and Peter Neaverson, Industrial Archaeology: Principles and Practice, Routledge, London, 1998, 1-15; Robert B. Gordon and Patrick M. Malone, The Texture of Industry: An Archaeological View of the Industrialisation of North America, Oxford University Press, New York, 1994, 11-36; Robert Darell Hicks, 'The ideology of maritime museums, with particular reference to the interpretation of early modern navigation', unpublished PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 2000, esp. 63-92. 18. Michael Robbins, 'The progress of transport history', journal of Transport History, 12 (1991), 74-87, at 83-5. 19. Editors' introduction to Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman (eds), The Social Shaping of Technology, Open University Press, Buckingham, 2nd edn, 1999, 3-27, at 5-11; Colin Divall, 'Technical change and railway systems', in R. W Ambler (ed.), The History and Practice of Britain's Railways, Ashgate, Aldershot, 1999, 97-111. 20. MacKenzie and Wajcman (eds), Social Shaping, 3-5; Richard Bessell, 'Transport' in Colin Chant (ed.), Science, Technology and Everyday Life, Routledge, London, 1989, 162-99; J. Dyos and D H. Aldcroft, British 154

History and the changing role of the object Transport: An Economic Survey from the Seventeenth to theTwentieth Century, Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1969, 345-51. 21. Michael Freeman, 'The railway as cultural metaphor: "What kind of railway history?" revisited', Journal of Transport History, 20 (1999), 160—7; Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1993, 124-45; Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, HarperCollins, London, 1995, 361-2; Sean O'Connell, The Car in British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring1896~1939, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1998,185-217; Julie Wosk, Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick NJ, 1992, esp. 178-210; Brian Haresnape, Design for Steam 1830-1960, Ian Allan, Shepperton, 1981, 8—15; John H. White, The American Eocomotive: An Engineering History 18301880, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2nd edn, 1997, 218-21, esp. 220. 22. Lubar, 'Learning from technological things', 32-3. MacKenzie and Wajcman (eds), Social Shaping, 11-27; John S. Staudenmaier, Technology's Storytellers: Remaving the Human Fabric, Society for the History of Technology/ MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1985,121-201. 23. Pierre Lemonnier, 'Bark capes, arrowheads and Concorde: on social representations of technology' in Hodder (ed.), Meaning of Things, 156-71. 24. Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes and Trevor Pinch (eds), The Social Construction of Technological Systems, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1987. 25. Hodder,'Post-modernism', 68—74. 26. Wiebe Bijker and Trevor Pinch, 'The social construction of facts and artefacts: or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other', in Bijker, Hughes and Pinch (eds), The Social Construction of Technological Systems, 17—50, at 28—46. 27. Gordon, 'Interpretation of artifacts', 74-93; W David Kingery, 'Technological systems and some implications with regard to continuity and change', in Lubar and Kingery (eds), History from Things, 215—30. 28. Kingery, 'Technological systems', 216-18, quotes at 218. Steven Lubar, 'Machine politics: the political construction of technological artifacts', in Lubar and Kingery (eds), History from Things, 206-8. Lubar argues that technologies do not, however, determine history, rather, they 'establish patterns and make it easy for us to follow those patterns' (208). 29. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections, 191. 30. Editors' introduction, Mark P. Leone and Barbara J. Little, Artifacts as expressions of society and culture: subversive genealogy and the value of history', and John D. Hunt, 'The sign of the object', all in Lubar and Kingery (eds), History from Things, ix, 160-81, 293-8. 31. Lubar and Kingery (eds), History fromThings, xii. 32. Our understanding of these terms is based on Stuart Hall, 'The work of 155

Making histories in transport museums

33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

representation' in Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, Sage, London, 1997, 13-64. Jacques Maquet, 'Objects as instruments, objects as signs', in Lubar and Kingery (eds), History from Things, 30-40, quote at 30. Maquet, 'Objects', 30-2. Maquet is arguing that an object's cultural-material conditions of production are distinct from its instrumental properties. Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch, 'Users as agents of technological change: the social construction of the automobile in the rural United States', Technology and Culture, 37 (1996), 763-95. Maquet,'Objects', 31-2, 39. Hugh Williams, APT: A Promise Unfulfilled, Ian Allan, Shepperton, 1985; Stephen Potter, On the Right Lines? The Limits of Technological Innovation, Frances Pinter, London, 1987, 45-80. Lubar, 'Machine polities', 197-214, at 199; MacKenzie and Wajcman (eds), Social Shaping, 19—21. Robert B. Gordon, 'Interpretation of artifacts', 74-6; Prown, 'Truth of material culture', 1-19; W. David Kingery, 'Materials science and material culture', in Kingery (ed.), LearningfromThings, 181-203. See also Gordon and Malone, Texture of Industry, 11-15. Jules Prown makes a similar point about the primacy of the artefact as historical evidence. Kingery, 'Materials science and material culture', 189-90. Gordon, 'Interpretation of artifacts', 76-9; Gordon and Malone, Texture of Industry, 24-9; W. David Kingery, 'A role for materials science', in Kingery (ed.), Learning from Things, 175—80; Kingery,'Materials science and material culture', 186. Michael Bailey and John Glitheroe, The Engineering and History of 'Rocket': A Survey Report, Science Museum/National Railway Museum, London, 2000. Gordon, 'Interpretation of artifacts' 77-8, and Gordon and Malone, Texture of Industry, 24; Stuart Piggott, Wagon, Chariot and Carriage: Symbol and Status in the History of Transport, Thames and Hudson, London, 1992, 132-7; Kevin J. Crisman and Arthur B. Cohn, When Horses Walked on Water: Horse-powered Terries in Nineteenth Century America, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC, 1998, 221-4. Gordon, 'Interpretation of artifacts', 76-9; Gordon and Malone, Texture of Industry, 24-32; Lubar and Kingery (eds), History from Things, ix-x; Corn, 'Object lessons', 43. Personal communication from Dr Peter Northover, Material Science Research Group, University of Oxford. Palmer and Neaverson, Industrial Archaeology, 24—5, 75—7. Gordon, 'Interpretation of artifacts', 80-1, and Texture of Industry, 16-20; Corn, 'Object lessons', 39-41; Thomas C. Gillmer, A History of Working Watercraft of the Western World, International Marine/McGraw Hill, Camden ME, 2nd edn, 1994, esp. 49-51, 78-82, 125-37, 249-53; Michael R. Bailey, 156

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47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

'Learning through replication: the Planet locomotive project', Transactions of the Newcomen Society, 68 (1996-97), 109-36. We owe this to Richard Gibbon. Langdon Winner, 'Do artifacts have politics?', in MacKenzie and Wajcman (eds), Social Shaping, 28-40, at 30-1. A symbol is more commonly understood as a signifier that stands in an extrinsic or metaphoric relationship with the signified. Maquet, 'Objects', 31, 36. Lubar,'Machine polities', 202. Maquet, 'Objects', 36-7, quote at 37. Maquet seems to be saying here that universals exist only in and through their instances. Maquet,'Objects', 38. Quoted in Philip Atkins, The Golden Age of Steam Locomotive Building, Atlantic Publishing/National Railway Museum, Penryn, 1999, 26. Maquet,'Objects', 31, 37-9, quotes at 37, 38. Prown,'Material/culture', 223. Maquet,'Objects', 39. Ibid., 34-35, 39. Piggott, Wagon, Chariot and Carriage, 148-55. Maquet,'Objects', 31, 35, 40; Piggott, Wagon, Chariot and Carriage, 123-6. Ibid., 31, 36, 39-40. R. Elliot et al., 'Towards a material history methodology', Susan M. Pearce, 'Thinking about things', and Jules D. Prown,'Mind in matter', all in Pearce (ed.), Interpreting Objects, 109-24, 125-32, 133-8. Susan M. Pearce, 'Artefacts as the social anthropologist sees them', in David Fleming, Crispin Paine and John G. Rhodes (eds), Social history in Museums: .A Handbook for Professionals, HMSO, London, 1993, 65^72; Moore, Museums and Popular Culture, 57-72. Pearce, 'Thinking about things', 128—9; Elliot, 'Material history methodology', 112, 117-19; Prown, 'Mind in matter', 134-5. Pearce, 'Thinking about things', 130; Moore, Museums and Popular Culture, 61-3; Elliot,'Material history methodology', 118-19; Ray Batchelor, 'Not looking at kettles', in Pearce (ed.), Interpreting Objects, 139-43. Pearce, 'Thinking about things', 130-1, and Museums, Objects and Collections, 144-91; Elliot, 'Material history methodology' 119. Prown,'Mind in matter', 135-6; Maquet,'Objects', 38-9. Prown,'Mind in matter', 135. Maquet, 'Objects', 35, 38. However, observers of historical objects do not have another, final check which is available when examining modern objects - a comparison of the perceptions of members of the society from which the object comes with those of cultural outsiders. Maquet,'Objects', 40. Alfred Gottwaldt, A philosophy of display' and Dieter Hopkin, 'A commentary on restoration, conservation and the National Railway Museum 157

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70. 71.

72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79. 80.

collection', both in Rob Shorland-Ball (ed.), Common Roots-Separate Branches: Railway History and Preservation, Science Museum/National Railway Museum, York, 1994, 210-14, 215-21. Robert Friedel, 'Some matters of substance' in Lubar and Kingery (eds), Historyfrom'Things, 41—50. Bijker and Pinch, 'Social construction', 17-50; S. O'Kane and A. Anderson, The Design Story of the Bicycle, Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, Cultra, n.d.; ].Woo&totAe,The Story of the Bicycle, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1970. Lawrence Fitzgerald and Gaby Porter (eds), Collecting and Interpreting Domestic Artefacts, Science and Industry Curators Group/Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, Manchester, 1994, 42-7; Colin Divall and Peta Turvey, Theories and Things: Putting Technologies on Show, video, Manchester Metropolitan University Educational Services, Manchester, 1995. The exhibition team was led by Gaby Porter. Although like all exhibitions 'The Garden' was a team effort, it benefited particularly from the contributions of Stephen Hoadley. NRM Object File 1988-7002. Dieter Hopkin, 'Commentary on restoration', 215-21. Hopkin, 'Commentary on restoration', 215-21; NRM Object File 1988-7002. D. S. M. Barrie, The Ijynton and Barnstaple Railway, Oakwood Press, Headington, 1988 (1st edn, 1936). David Hudson (ed.), The Ljnton and Barnstaple Railway: An Anthology, Oakwood Press, Headington, 1995. Elizabeth Edwards,'Photographs as objects of memory', in Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward and Jeremy Aynsley (eds), Material Memories: Design and Evocation, Berg, Oxford, 1999, 221-36. John Winton, The Little Wonder: 150 Years of the Ffestiniog Railway, Michael Joseph, London, 1986,125-6. Hicks,'Maritime museums', 22-3, 45,49, 63-92,101-3. But for good practice elsewhere see e.g. Stuart Piggott, The Earliest Wheeled Transport: From the Atlantic Coast to the Caspian Sea, Thames and Hudson, London, 1983.

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5 To travel hopefully. . . :

heritage transport as museums 'This ability to transform industrialism from a set of ruptural events into a mere moment in the unfolding of a set of harmonious relations between rulers and people may well turn out to be a distinctively English contribution to the development of the open-air museum form.' Tony Bennett, in R. Lumley (ed.) The Museum Time-Machine (Comedia, London, 1988), 72-3

So far this book has dealt with conventional transport museums and their largely static displays. But as we emphasized in the opening chapter, large numbers of people look at and travel by working examples of archaic vehicles. Heritage transport therefore has considerable potential for making public histories. It interprets the past chiefly by simulating it — at its most accomplished through something approaching mimesis — and more particularly by offering visitors a journey, both literally, from A to B, and metaphorically, back in time. And unlike most exhibitions in conventional transport museums, heritage transport is always in some degree a matter of 'living history', of re-enactment. This chapter explores the strengths and shortcomings of heritage transport as public history and looks at how visitors' appreciation of the past might be improved by adopting interpretive techniques analogous to those of material culture. Heritage transport and 'the past' By its very nature heritage transport recalls the past, but not all operators are deeply concerned about the way this is presented or how their passenger—visitors might comprehend it. Many operators offer little more than a ride — a flight in a hot air balloon, a short trip by steam train or on a paddle steamer, a ride by vintage bus or a meander in a horse-drawn narrowboat along a canal. Just as with visits to conventional transport museums, the wider purposes served by such activities are many and varied. From the passengers' point of view a trip might be no more than a pleasant way of spending some leisure time. As we remarked in Chapter 1, visitors to British heritage railways in the mid-1990s overwhelmingly expressed an interest in the novelty of steam rides rather than the railways' past. Sometimes heritage transport is a commercial, for-profit business (premium fare Vine-and-dine' trains, for instance), while it can also be 159

Making histories in transport museums aimed at economic rejuvenation through tourist development, perhaps a loss-maker in its own right but deemed worthy of subsidy because of wider socioeconomic benefits. Tramways are a good example. Melbourne, San Francisco and New Orleans all subsidize and operate old trams as tourist attractions. Although the authenticity of the equipment used in these kinds of operation varies considerably, heritage transport may contribute to a place's sense of identity. Postcards of each of these cities frequently feature trams: the vehicles have become, in the language of semiotics, indicators of their cities. However many, probably most, old vehicles are restored and operated primarily for the benefit of the enthusiasts who own them, with fares or hire fees from the public, where these can be got, a welcome contribution to the cost of restoring and maintaining ageing machinery. Although the private operation of archaic vehicles long predates the Second World War - the London to Brighton car rally is an example - its scale and scope increased very markedly after 1945, partly as a consequence of increases in leisure time and disposable income. In Britain during the late 1990s, for instance, over 400,000 privately-owned cars, lorries, buses, steam vehicles, commercial vehicles and public service vehicles over 20 years old were licensed for use on public roads.1 In the 1950s the increasing abandonment of Victorian and Edwardian technology and its associated skills encouraged a growth in the operation of railways by enthusiasts. In 1951 the short, narrow-gauge Talyllyn Railway in mid-Wales became the first line in the world to be operated by a preservation society, and by the end of the 1990s Britain's Heritage Railway Association had over 65 operating railways as members. In the USA there was a similar growth of interest in operating railed transport (initially streetcars) after the Second World War. The first vehicles ran on museum tracks in 1947 and by 1955 there were at least 16 groups trying to establish operating lines. Their successes influenced the emerging steam railroad movement; the first to be revived was the Strasburg Rail Road, taken over in 1957.2 Even old aircraft and ships are now operated privately, although here costs limit the scale of the equipment used. In the case of ships, for instance, the typical operation is a small vessel like the British paddle-steamer Waverley, its Australian counterparts Enterprise and Adelaide^ and the German harbour vessel Otto Luffer, not an ocean liner like \hzQueen Mary - the best the latter can hope for is a floating, but static, retirement.3 For most enthusiasts, restoring, running and perhaps displaying a vehicle at a rally are the limits of their ambitions. Indeed with many forms of heritage transport comparatively low costs mean that private enthusiasms can be satisfied in a private or semi-private arena. Aficionados of road transport, for example, can acquire a suitable old vehicle, restore it to running order and operate it for their own pleasure on the public highway

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for sums that are not beyond the means of many individuals and are certainly within reach of small consortia. Buses change hands for as little as £500 (US$800) and only the most exotic of historic cars cost more than, say, £30,000 (US$48,000), while use of the roads costs only modest sums for the likes of insurance and licences. (In Britain, even the latter requirement is waived in the case of vehicles over 25 years old.) Even with expensive vehicles that can only normally be afforded by groups, such as large aircraft and ships, access to the 'infrastructure' needed to operate the sea and the air - may be had fairly cheaply by using modern facilities. In all these cases,'the past' is understood largely in terms of movement, although there may also be private pleasures to be had from acquiring the skills to restore, maintain and use vehicles, and public benefits from seeing these skills demonstrated. Little thought is given to addressing the social purposes that originally gave transport and movement meaning this kind of heritage operation is analogous to the formalist displays of heavily restored vehicles in conventional transport museums. With railways — and to some degree inland waterways — matters are more complex. Here the urge to operate combines with economics and the necessity to provide a specialist infrastructure to produce a diversity of ways of representing the past. Preserved, privately-owned trains do quite commonly run on national networks such as Britain's Railtrack, but we are not concerned here with this kind of operation, which is analogous to running an old bus or car on modern roads. Rather we are interested in the operation of old trains over infrastructure which has itself fallen from ordinary commercial or public service use. But not all of these heritage railways are museums in the sense that they aim chiefly to represent or interpret the past. Some are tourist lines, commercial (or quasi-commercial) businesses that do not claim to offer much more than a ride. Others are owned by enthusiasts for whom operation itself is the primary, and sometimes the only, objective. These distinctions are rough and ready, but they do serve to identify some of the ways in which the use of old equipment can get muddled up with the representation of the past. Thus with tourist lines and some enthusiast lines it is arguable that old equipment is saved largely because it is comparatively cheap; buying redundant equipment is almost the only way in which vehicles and infrastructure can be afforded, unless one is prepared to be satisfied with miniaturized versions of the real thing. (A similar argument perhaps applies to the preservation of ships and large aircraft.) An unusually clear instance of this kind of development is found with the Strasburg Rail Road's origins as a private operation in the late 1950s. As a senior member of the management team commented in the mid-1990s, 'Quite simply, the 24 stockholders wanted to play trains': They were tired of playing with miniature steam or model trains and here 161

Making histories in transport museums was an opportunity to buy, own and operate a standard gauge railroad complete with a locomotive, a box car and a track maintenance car. There was never any consideration of railway preservation; the entire endeavour was wholly self-indulgent.4 In other cases, the urge to operate is satisfied by adapting old equipment for entirely new purposes. Thus, for example, the attraction, in Britain, of building short narrow-gauge railways on abandoned standard-gauge formations; if ex-industrial diesel traction is used the operation can be 'a genuine shoestring' one, as the proprietors of one such line, the Leadhills and Wanlockhead Railway, describe their concern.5 In all these cases interest in operation is so strong that it can overwhelm any antiquarian let alone historical interest in transport. Other heritage railways are much more sophisticated, although the urge to operate still often underpins much of their activity. The Strasburg Rail Road, for instance, developed into its modern form as a representation of a thriving American short line when the operators discovered in the early 1960s that large numbers of people were prepared to pay to ride through Amish country in old wooden passenger cars.6 But simply to operate trains, certain elements of the complex social system of historic operation (itself partly a reflection of a railway's technical requirements) must be reproduced. Railways towards the 'museum' end of the spectrum build on this necessity. They take seriously the task of collecting, preserving and operating old equipment and infrastructure to present a version of 'the past'.7 The museum railway is most commonly found and is perhaps at its most sophisticated in Britain, although Michael Stratton's comment on the philosophy of early open-air industrial museums — 'fluid if not illdefined' — applies to many lines.8 In many cases broadly educational aspirations are central to a railway's standing as a charity and the considerable tax privileges that follow. The Southern Steam Trust, for example, the body controlling the very successful Swanage Railway on the English south coast, is committed among other aims 'to create for the benefit of the public a comprehensive historical record of the development of steam railways and steam technology in Southern England'.9 Even those few heritage railways organized primarily as pro fit-making tourist concerns - the Paignton and Dartmouth is a good example - generate some of their appeal through the historical associations of their traction, rolling stock, infrastructure or route. Many heritage railways then do claim to offer the public more than the sight and experience of moving trains. How do they represent the past, and what kind of past is represented?

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Museum railways and mimesis At their best museum railways' specialist infrastructure and operating trains make up a complete package of sensual and historically 'authentic' experiences, effectively creating open-air museums that happen to be several miles long. They are excellent examples of the aestheticization of history - spatially ordered presentations of the past that draw heavily upon the visual ideologies of the technological sublime and the picturesque. Simulation extends to doing the jobs necessary to offer visitors a ride. In this sense museum lines also use 'living history' techniques, although there are, as we shall argue, strict limits to the re-enactment of the railways' historical social order. Overall the ideal is mimesis, the 'staged authenticity' of a facsimile of the past brought to life, which visitors are invited to enter and experience.10 Mimesis is a very widely accepted as an ideal by preservationistexhibitors. The concern with appearance is apparent everywhere - what is important, writes one senior British preservationist, 'is that the finished product should be externally authentic and provide the correct experience'.11 Thus, in addition to operating painstakingly restored locomotives and rolling stock, preservationists attempt to return buildings, structures and other infrastructure to how they used to look, and rebuild what has decayed or been destroyed.12 Preservationists know that the mimetic ideal can never be realized, although Neil Cossons, once director of the Science Museum, has acknowledged that some museum railways 'come pretty close to being complete replica railways recreating the authentic experience of a railway of the past'.13 Discounting for the moment those 'improvements' over which they have some control - such as the meretricious ornamentation of stations with hanging baskets, enamel advertising signs and the like — there are other numerous and more serious alterations where there is little or no choice. Even the most fastidious of museum railways has to change in order to work independently lines that were once parts of larger systems; locomotive sheds and comprehensive workshops, for example, are developed from much more modest facilities or even greenfield sites. Amenities for visitors such as lavatories, shops and cafes are another common and necessary intrusion. Locomotives and rolling stock are often inappropriate for the lines they operate on. Practical considerations reinforce these distortions. For instance, mainline coaches dating from the 1950s are widely used even though they are out of place on a museum branchline, because the vehicles were cheap, have fairly low maintenance costs, and save more historic coaches from the wear and tear of everyday service. Operating methods are often different, perhaps because traffic levels exceed the capacity of original layouts or because of modern safety legislation. Train formations, particularly at busy periods, are often 163

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hopelessly inauthentic, journey times lengthened by the combined dictates of safety legislation, financial prudence and perceptions of what visitors will regard as value-for-money. Like many other sectors of industrial archaeology, museum railways are arguably more involved with physical conservation than elucidating the social parameters of industrial development.14 'Recreating' the past (accepting for the moment that this is possible in some sense) should not just be about an 'authentic' physical environment. It is also about 'making the past come alive', taking the empty stage setting of a railway and animating it with historical characters. Preservationists tend to give this less thought. Of course all museums need staff to run trains, but they only do the jobs needed to allow visitors to travel. True, operating is a kind of experimental archaeology in which old skills are demonstrated.15 But important though this is, it hardly exhausts what can be said about the social history of transport. Operating staff are not true 'character-interpreters', costumed performers impersonating historical railway workers. Operators, nor anyone else for that matter, do not explain to visitors about the way the job was done in the past, what working conditions were like, and so on. In Britain (and there is little evidence that matters are more satisfactory elsewhere) discussion of the role of costumed interpreters hardly moves beyond the question of whether staff should wear appropriate uniforms or other working apparel - another facet, of course, of the concern for authentic appearance.16 Museum railways thus often overplay their strengths when they claim to offer the 'authentic experience' of travel in the 1950s, or whenever. But such boasts should not be taken too seriously, and visitors should be credited with a modicum of common sense. It seems unlikely that they really believe that everything they see is as it was. More likely they engage with the represented past in a similar fashion to someone who reads a good historical romance — as David Brett remarks, 'No matter how grounded it is in scholarship, we do not mistake the novel for a history book.'17 Visitors then may knowingly, even playfully, engage with the socalled authentic experience, acknowledging its inevitable shortcomings while at the same time taking the opportunity to let their imaginations work. Perhaps they understand the scene as 'hyper-real' 'more real' than the original, and perhaps too some of them are 'post-tourists' who 'almost delight in the inauthenticity of the normal tourist experience'.18 These are all hypotheses that urgently need investigating. On the other hand it would also be wise to apply the precautionary principle we have advocated throughout this book, to acknowledge that mimesis is potentially a very coercive and conservative form of exhibition. Preservationists and visitors may well collude over the staged authenticity of a museum railway, acknowledging the impossibility of literally 164

Heritage transport as museums 'experiencing the past'and suspending disbelief as a condition of entering the display. But the highly evocative sensual experiences of smells, sounds and so on associated with moving trains all help to anchor the 'reality' of the spectacle even as visitors know they are not literally travelling in the past, making it difficult for them to engage critically with the partial nature of the past that is represented. Just as with a conventional exhibition, it is the meanings conveyed by the selection and arrangement of objects together - their poetics - which matter more than the individual things themselves. The things may well be authentic in the sense that they are restored according to the best available scholarship, a point that preser-vationists are justifiably keen to make. But sound scholarship and authentic restoration have long coexisted — and not just in the realm of heritage transport - with an antiquarian failure to appreciate the bigger picture.19 This can lead to a poetics that, perhaps unintentionally and as much by omission as commission, reproduces myths about the past. Collusion, in other words, may extend to a shared failure to reflect upon deep-seated assumptions about the past. It is all very well knowing that one is reading a historical novel, but unless one knows about the history of the period it is impossible to say where and how the novel departs from 'the truth'. Accordingly we turn to an analysis of the mythic structures and narratives of museum railways. The mythic structure of heritage railways: the journey and railway work Most visitors to museum railways take a trip on the train and so engage with 'the past' in a highly directed fashion; a journey is a pattern of circulation through the major parts of the exhibition, the railway. The fact that visitors move round as 'passengers' helps to sustain a particular understanding of the past. More particularly, just as with conventional exhibitions, the past is prefigured to provide for an uncontroversial reading: social and natural harmony are key themes. Playing as passengers is a natural role for many visitors (many, but not all), something that is done without being thought about. But travel and not only by train - is also a highly socialized activity relying on formal and informal norms essential to the smooth, industrialized processing of people. So the fact that visitors 'naturally' fall into the role of passengers suggests that despite railways' somewhat reduced importance in everyday life, the basic rules of railway travel are still quite widely known. Most people, even those who do not use trains, do not need to be told to buy a ticket, to wait on the platform or in a waiting room, to get in and out of carriages at stations, and so on. This is of inestimable value to museum railways because it means that the public does not have to be

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Making histories in transport museums closely supervised in what is potentially a very dangerous environment.20 But it also means that visitors literally and metaphorically see the railway only from one perspective. Railways have always been highly regulated and ordered spaces; there are many areas to which the public normally has no access - ticket offices, the track, locomotive footplates, signal boxes and so on. Museum lines faithfully reflect this exclusion and so much of the 'arcane and complex mystery of the railway', in Ralph Harrington's phrase, remains hidden or partly hidden from passengervisitors' gaze.21 This means there are few chances to learn at first hand about a whole range of railway occupations - what skills are involved, what working conditions used to be like, how the post fitted into the railway hierarchy and so on. Much more research needs to be done on this, but it is possible, probable even, that lacking the chance to find out anything to the contrary, visitors leave the exhibition/railway continuing to believe those bits and pieces of much older ways of understanding railway work which have survived in popular memory. These ideas and images were always selective and partial. Thus, if we are right, without realizing it preservationists and visitors tend to see 'the past' through spectacles that provide a misleading image of the historical social order. At best museum lines embody what Tony Bennett in a different context has described as 'an institutionalized mode of amnesia', none the less damaging for being unconsciously wrought.22 As David Wilson remarks, they tend to reproduce an image of railway work 'taken on board through books, magazines, poems, sea-side holidays and films — a mythologised account of working class life . . . idealised, by boys both small and large on a thousand platform ends throughout the 1950s and 1960s'.23 Take, for example, steam locomotives and their crew. The groups that gather at the platform end testify that these still hold a very firm grip on the public imagination, as they have done since at least the early nineteenth century. Chapter 2 introduced the idea of the technological sublime, the nineteenth-century counterpart to the older notion of nature as awesome and mysterious. Railway locomotives were among the first industrial technologies to be perceived in this way and the behaviour of modern visitors suggests that, at least in the museum context, traces of the technological sublime still attach to working steam engines.24 Although we exaggerate to make the point, people are both attracted to and wary of the pent-up power demonstrated by a steam engine's size, heat, sounds and smells. Children are more open in their reactions, but adults feel this too. Moreover, historically the locomotive's awesome power was an important element in the myths that built up around footplate crew, particularly the driver. As Harrington remarks, the 'footplate was, perhaps more than any other industrial location, where the human and the mechanical interacted most directly and most dramatically', the driver

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Heritage transport as museums above all personifying the tension and resolution between the two spheres, turning him into a heroic figure.25 Echoes of this likely still inform modern perceptions, for enginemen on heritage lines seem to be venerated much as they were from the mid-nineteenth century and their workplace, the cab, retains something of the sense of a sacred place — and not just because access is barred by modern health and safety regulations and practical operating considerations. Museum railways arguably also trade on another, and in some ways contradictory, set of historical images, that of the railway as a rule-bound machine which absorbs all human endeavour, rendering it invisible. The survival in popular consciousness of elements of this image might explain the comparative indifference shown by visitors towards those occupations other than the driver which were essential to the railways' safe working; as Wilson says, the 'wheeltapper became a vaudevillian figure of fun, but nobody laughed when the wheels came off'.26 The result is a partial representation of the past that smooths over the tensions, conflicts, ruptures and transformations of history. Wilson, for example, argues that in Britain social class played an important part in shaping public consciousness of engine drivers. He suggests that railway companies and their largely middle-class passengers were responsible for creating the 'romantic' and 'exaggerated' image of drivers as personnel with a crucial responsibility for passengers' safety. According to Wilson this helped the railway companies to deflect blame for accidents on to drivers and other railway workers. The heroic image of drivers also deflected public attention away from their harsh working conditions.27 There are some difficulties with this line of thought — for one thing it downplays footplate crews'own use of cultural imagery in defence of their relatively privileged position within the class and gender structure of the railway and wider society.28 But it raises the important issue of the politics of occupational identity, and in particular of the way in which this might still contribute to an image of social harmony which, at the very least, is a highly simplified picture of the truth. The mythic structure of heritage railways: place and landscape The relationship between museum railways and the locations through and to which they convey their passenger—visitors is another important aspect of their narrative structure. Here we build on the idea that museum railways trade on long-standing and deep-seated cultural images associated with tourism. Although modern visitors cannot experience the railway in exactly the same way as their forebears — most obviously, a museum railway is now more clearly itself a destination, the journey an experience to be 'consumed' - the ways in which a line is defined in relation to place 167

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and landscape draw upon a long history of tourist imagery dating back to before the earliest mainline railways. Chief among these ways of seeing were notions of the picturesque, the definition of locations as landscapes or places as to be gazed upon or 'consumed'aesthetically. Defining locations in terms of a historical gaze - that is, as 'heritage' - was another important facet of this process, and not only in Britain. The railways contributed heavily to the evolution of such images from the late nineteenth century through pictorial posters, travel literature and other forms of advertising.29 The process of naturalization is an important aspect of the way museum lines are presented. By becoming redefined in terms of the tourist gaze, railways become absorbed into a picturesque rural landscape and thus divorced from their history as parts of industrial society — although they are far from the only kind of industrial monument to be represented in this fashion.30 This process is clearly evident with the archetypal heritage railway, the country branchline or secondary route. (We are here discussing Britain, but similar arguments may be applied elsewhere.) Simply in terms of route mileage, railways have always been more of a rural than an urban presence, ^et culturally — and for that matter, politically and economically — railways were also what John Stilgoe describes in the American context as a 'metropolitan corridor', transporting the values of industrial modernity through and into city, town, suburb and countryside alike.31 Historically, however, the railways own cultural practices downplayed this alien invasion. Lithographs commissioned by the early companies, for instance, tended to show newly built lines as integral parts of the landscape, their trains passing through a countryside populated by unconcerned animals and rustics, or being used by the social elite.32 Much later in the nineteenth century rural idylls were taken into the imagery of travel posters, a major weapon in the railways' battle to develop leisure travel. What is so striking about even the most museumoriented of heritage railways is that almost without exception they continue, in a modern idiom, to downplay the urban—industrial in favour of an image of the railway as an organic part of a pastoral idyll. The phenomenon has been most extensively studied in relation to Britain, notably by Richard Sykes and his colleagues. 'If social harmony is the keynote of railway operation,' writes this group of critics noting the rural location of most British lines, 'natural harmony is the keynote of railway geography.' Thus, in their publicity, heritage railways often stress the 'happy coincidence of landscape and line', emphasizing the pleasurable connotations of the countryside through which they pass, whether it be the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway's 'evocative West Yorkshire scenery' in the north of England or the 'Glorious Scenery' of the Swanage Railway in the south. (Similar tropes are used in other countries - the Strasburg Rail Road transforms the gently rolling landscape of Lancaster County, 168

Heritage transport as museums Pennsylvania into 'spectacular farmland!) Thus everything about heritage railways, from their names - Bluebell, Watercress, North Yorkshire Moors to their florid descriptions of the passing agricultural seasons, 'serves to naturalise the railways in an image that establishes them as part of the timeless wonder of the English countryside'. In this way the heritage railway 'has effectively displaced the memory of its industrial origins and replaced them, in the popular mind, with a rural idyll'.33 This pastoralizing movement extends to station buildings and certain other structures, such as signalboxes. These become redefined as examples of rural vernacular architecture, another aspect of the picturesque gaze, rather than the often standardized or semi-standardized products of a large-scale industry. The ornamentation of country stations with copious flower beds and hanging baskets, sometimes rationalized by preservationists as a typical pursuit of under-employed railway workers in the past, serves to reinforce the image. Other kinds of image projected by heritage railways help to displace their industrial character. Associations with 'historical' places or landscapes are fairly common, a strategy also inherited, in Britain at least, from the old companies. In the USA the Strasburg Rail Road combines historical tradition and the American rural idiom of 'hard work, discipline, frugality and self-reliance' in its invitation to'experience first-hand scenes of Amish families working fertile farms just as they had a century ago'. One minor railway in central England markets itself as 'The Battlefield Line' on the grounds that it runs through the site of a battle from the fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses, while the Swanage Railway in Dorset makes great play of its seventeenth-century Civil War connections — the railway runs close by Corfe Castle, ruined at the end of a successful siege by the parliamentary forces. 'Simply the Best', proclaims a publicity leaflet against a large colour photograph of a steam train powering across a landscape dominated by the ruins — 'Glorious Scenery Historic Locations The Sunshine Coast and STEAM'.34 As this last example suggests, the cultural imagery of the seaside is another very powerful factor informing the presentation of heritage railways in Britain. While trips to the seaside predated the railway, the creation of a national network and, particularly, the linking of urban centres with the seaside encouraged the rapid development of resorts in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Through their graphic posters and written publicity brochures and booklets, the railways contributed heavily to the evolution of the idea of the seaside as a place of leisure, an increasingly sophisticated process which led to the differentiation of resorts in terms of 'character'and social class. Common to all was the projection of the seaside as a place free from the constraints of urban life, even as the urbanindustrial system of the railway made the journey to the sea possible.35 Several of the busiest heritage lines in addition to the Swanage Railway 169

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terminate at seaside resorts, and, in building on these images, they naturalize themselves as sites of leisure. It would, of course, be entirely appropriate for these lines to explore the important role they played in the historical development of the seaside towns they serve. But their visitors are offered little more than allusions to the very imagery used by the old railway companies to promote their services. For instance the Swanage Railway's advertising legend, 'The Sunshine Coast', refers to highly successful publicity campaigns run by the Southern Railway between the world wars.36 Travelling on the train for the few miles from the inland terminus (having in all likelihood arrived by car) to the sea at Swanage might provoke recollections among older people of long and often tedious journeys taken as children. But for anyone else - and indeed, even for this older audience - the experience does not provide the evidence needed to understand the historical growth of Swanage as a resort and the role of the railway companies and their nationalized successor in all of this. The myths of the rural idyll, historical place and seaside holiday are apparently not available to the minority of railways located predominantly in urban or industrial areas. The Middleton, Tanfield, Bowes and Foxfleld railways, for example, are all short English lines originally built to carry only freight traffic (coal and engineering goods in the first case, coal in the last three), while the narrow-gauge Leighton Buzzard, and the Sittingbourne and Kemsley Light Railways (sand extraction and paper manufacture respectively) were also wholly industrial. The existence of such railways goes some way to meet the charge that as a body heritage railways deny their industrial origins. But quite apart from the fact that such lines are in a distinct minority, their modern presentation dilutes their industrial flavour. In the first place all offer rides (although the Tanfield does at least attempt to replicate the experience of travelling in the kind of spartan vehicle used in colliery workers' trains). Morever, both the Tanfield and the Foxfield Railways pass through some pleasant countryside, which allows them to be recreated partly in the rural idiom. This tactic is denied the others, which are all located either wholly within industrial complexes (the paper mills of the Sittingbourne line) or in urban districts. But again with the striking exception of the Sittingbourne line - which, significantly, has always struggled to attract visitors - the industries once served by these railways either have closed down or retreated from public view, thus permitting the re-presentation of the remaining structures and lines alike as picturesque monuments to the industrial achievements of the past.37 Prospects for change: the social structure of museum railways The myths that inform museum railways' attempts at mimesis only matter insofar as visitors take the package as a fair representation of the past, and 170

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this, as we have stressed, remains largely an unknown. Still it seems likely that most people are not equipped with the kind of knowledge enabling them to move beyond these myths. Helping visitors in this regard and thus fulfilling the potential of museum railways as vehicles for public history is the responsibility of preservationists. They themselves need to reflect on the ways that they represent the past. How likely is such critical self-examination? The signs, in Britain at least, are mixed. There are indications of a growing debate about the way heritage railways treat the past.38 Intense competition for visitors — most lines depend on them for the greater part of their income — has encouraged a minority of preservationists to offer some basic interpretation couched in terms of social history. In the late 1990s, for example, the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway erected a series of graphic panels at sites on and alongside the branch treating various aspects of the line's history, including the 30 years or so that it had been run as a heritage operation. While the Worth Valley panels were not entirely free of mythical allusions, they gave basic historical information rarely found on heritage railways, such as staffing levels at stations and the kinds of freight traffic handled during the line's heyday. Similarly, in southern England the Kent and East Sussex Railway has added a small, award-winning museum at one of its stations, giving visitors an insight into the affairs of the maverick businessman who ran the line between the world wars. On the other hand these efforts are very much the exception, and there are few signs that they will be repeated on a large scale. Part of the explanation might lie with the social make-up of the volunteers who provide most of the labour on heritage railways and thus have a large influence on matters of presentation. Unfortunately no one has systematically analysed the social structure of heritage lines - the way they are organized and work as not-for-profit bodies, the age, social class, ethnicity and gender of the volunteers, their reasons for volunteering, and so on.39 Many museum railways are strikingly democratic in ethos, but democracy does not guarantee historical insight and the mythical presentation of the past is likely connected with the strong presence of middle-class and increasingly middle-aged volunteers — although neither is it inherently the case that the past will be represented from a professional—managerial perspective. But if critics are right, the reasons why people volunteer also tend to block the kind of self-awareness needed if preservationists are to transcend the mythical elements in the presentation of heritage lines. Volunteers are a mixed group of individuals and one should not assume that their motives are identical. But many cultural critics argue that participating in heritage activities can be understood partly as a form 171

Making histories in transport museums of escape from the pressures of modern life, particularly its incessant sense of impermanence and change. David Brett for instance suggests that participating in heritage activities allows one 'to return . . . to a temporary condition of 'mythic' time/space, where there is relief from uninterrupted disturbance and everlasting uncertainty, and in which all that is solid does not melt into air'.40 Drawing on the still earlier work of Patrick Wright, himself inspired by Agnes Heller, Richard Sykes and his colleagues suggest that a similar incentive underpins volunteering on heritage railways. Middle-class men in particular can escape from the bureaucratized and rationalized nature of much modern employment by acquiring obsolete manual skills within the 'unproblematic' social context provided by the railway. This is, partly at any rate, a 'hankering after times when skilled manual work brought not only pride but identity'. The railway provides a clearly established (which is to say, historic) hierarchy of skills and promotion, so that, for example, a volunteer on the footplate side can progress through the ranks from cleaner to fireman to driver: The progression . . . is demanding but clear. Although the skills themselves may be difficult to learn, the need for them, and their order of acquisition, remain unquestionable. Thus enthusiasts 'relive' the life of the railway employee through the imperatives of a simple and clearly defined company and social order, based on a hierarchy of skills.41 In short, the heritage railway provides a harmonious social order in which to play at skilled work. This remains an interesting hypothesis, a stimulus for further research. It will have to deal with the fact that running a heritage railway is sometimes far from restful and free of strife, and that much of the activity behind the scenes is not as skilled as nor obviously more satisfying than paid employment in the 'real' world. Yet it is plausible to suggest that despite these realities, volunteers are sustained partly in their commitment by a belief that 'the past' was indeed a harmonious place in which to live, and its re-creation therefore worthwhile. If it is indeed the case that volunteers are, in David Wilson's phrase, 'living the myth, re-acting the fantasy' or, in Hugh Dougherty's judgement, trying to 'recreate the familiarity of their childhood and youth', then they are unlikely to welcome suggestions that they should think more critically about the way they represent the past to visitors.42 Social class and age are not the only categories with a bearing on the presentation of the past. As with many other representations of the industrial past, the railways' traditionally gendered division of labour tends to continue.43 Men dominate in those areas where they have always done so — particularly in operating grades — while women are more likely to take on tasks such as catering. There are exceptions, including in the 1980s and 1990s the accession of a tiny handful of women to the footplate.

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Heritage transport as museums Interestingly, this did not generate much debate about the authenticity of the public spectacle, although it is impossible to say whether this is further evidence of a lack of commitment to animated mimesis, an ironic comment on its very premise, or a principled stand on gender equality. There are also very few people of colour, which helps to explain why nothing is done to mark the large contributions these social groups made to the running of Britain's railways after the Second World War, a common timeframe for heritage lines - although admittedly black and Asian people would have been an unusual sight in rural parts in the 1950s and 1960s.44 Finally it is scarcely surprising, given the ways in which the presentation of the past is bound up with collective memories and identities, that it can be significant whether preservationists are 'outsiders' or 'insiders' in relation to other social groups with an interest in a project. We have already mentioned how historically railways contributed, partly through their promotion of tourism, to the redefinition of 'peripheral' locations in terms of the values of the metropolitan 'centre', and what we have in mind here is the modern equivalent. The most striking example of this in Britain is a long-running and sometimes acrimonious dispute over the revival of the Welsh Highland Railway in north-west Wales, the rebuilding of which commenced in the 1990s under the control of the neighbouring Ffestiniog Railway, a highly successful tourist operation. The struggling Welsh Highland had closed in 1937 after a fairly short existence carrying tourists into the mountainous, part-industrialized semi-wilderness of what is now the Snowdonia National Park. After nearly 30 years of dereliction a small group of mainly local people proposed reviving the line as a boost to the ailing economy. However, their ambitious plans to rebuild the entire route were continually frustrated, and to the outsider the Ffestiniog Railway's involvement might have seemed an ideal solution. For locals, this was far from the case. The north-west of Wales has a strong sense of regional-national identity, and the Ffestiniog was seen by many Welsh Highland preservationists and local people as a business run by and for the English. The Welsh Highland's history and how this should be presented formed some of the substance of disagreement between the two parties. In particular it was widely assumed — not without reason — that the Ffestiniog's own uneven commitment to conservation and mimetic interpretation would inform the WHR rebuilding45 The Welsh Highland preservationists wanted to place a much greater emphasis on interpreting the line's history, and from a Welsh point of view.46 A future for the past on museum railways Museum railways do not have to represent the past in mythical terms even if - as seems inevitable - mimesis remains the dominant form of

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interpretation. Mimesis is not objectionable if the fact of simulation is clearly evident. Indeed, a simulacrum can be as good a way of communicating as an authentic object; one imaginative proposal for a new museum envisages replicating a mid-Victorian railway using none but modern materials. What is important is the status of the 'reality' — that is, the past - being simulated.47 How then might heritage railways move towards a more critical popular history? In Chapter 4 we suggested that conventional transport museums could attempt this by providing opportunities for visitors to develop skills in decoding the social meanings of objects. Museum railways could do something similar by reworking visitors' experience of the railway itself. In spatial terms railways are collections of buildings, structures and other spaces gathered together on sites (for instance, stations) themselves linearly arranged along a route that passes through places and landscapes. Developing a capacity to decode the social meanings of these buildings, spaces, places and landscapes is the equivalent of 'reading' objects as material culture.48 As we have argued, the most significant feature of the narrative typology of museum lines is the more or less unconscious constraints placed on visitors when they circulate as 'passengers'. While free access to the likes of signalboxes and locomotive footplates is not possible, opening up more of the railway and enabling visitors to circulate through it in novel ways would be one way of starting to reconfigure their experience and thus their comprehension of the past. A brief comparison with the circulation through country houses is instructive. A museum railway is rather like a country house in which access to the servants' quarters and the service part of the house is denied or glimpsed only from afar. Yet just opening up the railway equivalent the ticket offices, goods agent's offices, signalboxes, lamp rooms and so on - would not be enough. The order in which the parts of a house are met informs a visitor's perception of their meanings and the social order which sustains these. For instance, to come to the service quarters first and then move upstairs to the living rooms of the master and mistress has a different effect than the reverse flow, the usual practice. In the former case the living rooms are likely to be understood primarily as places that had to be serviced rather than (as with the normal circulation) places of gracious living. Both perspectives of course have a validity, and establishing some understanding of the relationship between them would be a valuable interpretive goal. Partial histories that are clearly identified as such can be a useful step on the road to a fuller and more inclusive - but not 'objective' - understanding of the past. Thus though it is rarely possible, seeing a house three times, as a'servant'/master'and 'mistress', is one way of doing this.49 174

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Museum railways could offer alternative patterns of circulation to the journey. For instance, visitors might be given the chance to arrive at and move around a station as a very different kind of customer from the passenger, namely someone wishing to despatch or collect livestock, goods or mechandise by rail. Even at the small country stations typically found on heritage lines this would involve a very different set of sites (and sights); goods and passenger facilities were usually separate, the goods far less well appointed than the passenger. Thus a visitor might enter the station through a separate yard gate, visit the goods agent's office and then move on to the interior of the goods shed (for small or fragile items) or out to the yard sidings (bulkier and more robust merchandise). This would at least start to bring home the fact that well into the twentieth century railways were important carriers of goods for any but the most local of journeys. It would also provide some context for the goods trains that some museum railways occasionally run. Another possibility would be to allow visitors to move around a station from the perspective of different grades of railway worker. Seeing, for example, a booking office first from inside, looking out through the ticket window at 'passengers' in the booking hall could be a first step in developing a basic historical appreciation of the distinctive culture of railway work (in this case, white-collar clerical work) that is lacking on most museum lines. Again, the young lad-porter would have known a different set of spaces at a station from those of the more senior traffic grades of signalman-porter, signalman or stationmaster - although spatial distinctions at smaller rural stations were less marked than they were at the larger, complex facilities more commonly found in urban areas. But one cannot expect everything; to adapt Michael Ettema's observations noted in the last chapter, not all historical issues are spatially equal, and this applies even more when considering the spaces that have happened to survive. But even the smaller stations often retain buildings that serve as signs of trades not commonly represented by museum railways; the lampman or boy, for example, would have been very familiar with the small hut or room, often set away from the main buildings as a precaution against fire, where he filled oil into signal lamps. There are also spaces away from stations it might be possible to open up in a controlled way - signal boxes and locomotive facilities, for example, although here the practical issues that have always played a part in making these private still apply, arguably with greater force than ever given the increasingly legalistic framework of health and safety. But a little imagination (although perhaps rather more by way of money and time) could turn up some fresh opportunities. For instance some heritage railways collect signal boxes in the hope that one day they will be made operational. In the meantime these could be erected and fitted out with 175

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visitors in mind (as indeed one or two have been already). And the very humble permanent-way hut, a place of shelter and respite for the gangs of labourers who worked on the track, is, in its very crudity and location removed from the public view, a good sign of its occupants' historically low standing in the railway hierarchy. The fabric of railway buildings could also be a valuable resource in giving a sense of historical change, but only if the dominant ethos of ruthlessly rebuilding back to earlier appearances is modified. Several museum railways are prepared to break with consistent mimesis to the extent of restoring individual stations to a condition representing a different period from that of the rest of the line; what none does is deliberately leave a station, or a part of it, with the minimum of intervention so that, just as with the Lynton and Barnstaple coach, the multiple layers of physical evidence could be used by visitors to explore the changing patterns of usage, ownership and so on.50 There are many practical difficulties to introducing these ideas, and they will not all prove feasible, even on the best resourced and motivated of museum lines. But looking at how other open-air museums interpret the past suggests some ways forward for railway preservationists. One possibility is a much greater degree of intervention at the point of transition from the modern world to the constructed 'historic zone'. More by accident than by design this boundary is usually more blurred with heritage railways than with many open-air or living-history museums. For example while visitor facilities such as cafes and shops are usually located in historic station buildings or in new buildings disguised by neo-vernacular architecture, once inside there is no mistaking the modern nature of the economic transactions that take place. Shop workers are not costumed, there is no pretence that the products they sell are 'historic'. This helps to rupture the illusion of mimesis and serves, perhaps, to emphasize the financial realities of maintaining the railway (although there are critics who would argue that all that is happening is that consumption is being encouraged under the guise of play).51 Yet for all this, as visitors walk from their cars into the station and buy tickets at the ticket-office window they cross from the site's outside to its inside, moving over from 'the present' to 'the past'. Here is the best point for greater intervention, perhaps initially by way of an orientation centre. Visitors might, for instance, purchase their admission tickets in a modern structure, or an older but clearly adapted building, which offers the chance to think about the history of the railway, its workforce and its relationship to the surrounding places and landscapes - an important counter to the naturalization of social relations through what Tony Bennett calls their miniaturization and self-enclosure in open-air museums, something discussed in more detail on pp. 178-81.52 Only then 176

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would visitors pass on to the terrain of the railway itself. Naturally the form and content of these displays would be of the utmost importance if they are to be attractive to visitors and not simply to reproduce the kinds of myths heritage railways already trade on. The most valuable role the exhibitions might perform is encouraging people to think about historical re-enactment as a form of play; this in itself might alert visitors to the different ways the past can be represented and sensitize them to the partial nature of the representation they are about to witness. Providing insights into the history of the railway in its museum phase would be an essential aspect of this. The fact that most heritage railways have several points of entry (stations) would make it practically difficult to offer the facility to all visitors at the start of their journey. But most lines have one or two stations that attract the greater proportion of visitors, and these are the obvious locations for the centres. A more serious difficulty is that no matter how attractive the exhibitions, only a fraction of visitors is likely to look at them. A lot more thought therefore needs to be given to intervention in the historic zone. The presentation of the past here is already theatrical in some degree, and so it would not be a big step conceptually to offer more drama as a way of introducing topics and perspectives and, most importantly, a sense of historical process and change that eludes mimesis. The roles of first- and third-person interpreters also demand careful consideration. We have already discussed the very limited sense in which operating staff behave as character-interpreters; it seems likely that this casts confusion in visitors' minds since there is no way of knowing what is and what is not historically 'authentic'. A multi-pronged approach, like that often found in living-history museums, particularly in the USA and Australia, is needed. Costumed staff should be made more aware of the circumstances of their historical roles and become proactive in explaining these to visitors. How far this should be attempted through first-person re-enactment is open to debate - the issue is hardly a settled one in other museums.53 Indeed there is an argument for saying that operating staff should not be costumed since visitors would then be less likely to think that what they are seeing is 'authentic'. In any case, since many operating staff cannot, for reasons of safety, act more fully as interpreters (footplate crew, for instance, or permanent way gangers), other ways will have to be found to explain their jobs. One possibility is the introduction of third-person interpreters at major sites and on trains (akin to explainers or docents in conventional museums), whose role would be to answer queries and offer visitors a fresh perspective on what they see - or perhaps more importantly, do not see - before them. Dressed in ways that break the mimetic illusion and place them firmly in 177

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the present, these interpreters' challenging job would be to provoke and facilitate the reworking of visitors' experience. Other methods, some already in use, could further this process. Heritage railways in the USA and Australia quite often use live or taped commentaries on the moving train, giving basic information on the history of the railway and its relationship to the surrounding communities and landscape. There is always the danger of nostalgia pervading these commentaries, but this is not of course inherent in the technique. A less intrusive — but by that very fact arguably less effective — method is to give passengers a leaflet or booklet. Off the train, the whole battery of techniques used to interpret other historic sites could be adapted to museum railways - using leaflets, taped commentaries and interpretation boards to offer self-guided tours is one possibility, a particularly attractive one if these were to open up spaces hitherto closed to visitors. Guided tours might also prove feasible. These methods would provide most visitors with the opportunity to learn a little about the history of the railway, perhaps to make them more aware of the myths that tend to inform the way the past is read. A comprehensive treatment is not possible, any more than it is in a conventional transport museum. Museum railways could, however, do more for that minority of visitors prepared to make a greater commitment of time (and money). Living-history museums such as Colonial Williamsburg provide opportunities for quite lengthy visits - sometimes one or two days - that allow the greater exploration of certain facets of the museum's subject. Heritage railways have started to do something similar, most notably with 'footplate experience' courses, varying in length from a few hours to one or more days, that allow visitors to fire and drive locomotives under supervision. These courses have to be carefully conceived and executed if they are not to reinforce myths about railway work. David Wilson, a footplateman in the 1960s, argues that a few hours on an engine often amounts to little more than a Video arcade game for those lucky enough to have the requisite disposable income to play'. Yet as Wilson remarks, by combining experience of the footplate with explanations of daily work routines it is possible to provide insights into the historical identity of footplate crew.54 In principle there is no reason why the footplate should be the only facet of railway work to be treated in this way. Interpreting the route Heritage railways are linear industrial sites, operating over routes that are often well over a hundred years old; the line and its surrounding locations are palimpsests of the social and physical changes during this time. Museum lines should think more carefully about how to interpret these 178

Heritage transport as museums spatial histories as a way of helping visitors break out of the historic zone and the misleading visual conventions through which this tends to be presented. They should help visitors decode in new ways what they literally and metaphorically - see before them as they journey along the railway, uncovering the layers of meaning that exist in and on the ground. Preservationists could interpret these changes to visitors by adapting theories and techniques from other areas of archaeology, becoming in the process leaders in the industrial sector.55 Part of what is needed is a reworking of the experience of the journey so that greater emphasis is given to the wider landscape and places served by the line, and less to the element of transport and the physical features of the railway itself. This would open up new possibilities for understanding the past, reintegrating the railway into the totality of the landscape by recontextualizing the line as a site originally built to serve certain social needs. In general terms, historians and historical geographers have a good understanding of the interaction of natural resources, topographical features and human agency that led to the routing of Britain's railways and their contribution to the development of certain kinds of landscapes and townscapes.56 The tradition of local studies referred to in Chapter 3 could play a major role in developing an understanding of how these factors interacted at the level of specific museum lines. For example, the Durango and Silverton Railroad opened up territory for American gold prospectors, while Welsh narrow-gauge lines such as the Ffestiniog Railway were critical for the rapid growth of the quarrying of slate and its export in the nineteenth century. The Keighley and Worth Valley Railway was built largely with local finance to develop textile manufacturing and engineering in the Pennine valleys it served. Although much of the physical evidence of these industries and the communities that served them has disappeared, enough remains to be able to think about a more contextualized interpretation of each railway's history. The ghost town at Silverton, the slate heaps and tight-knit terraced houses of Blaneau Ffestiniog, the harbour at Porthmadog, the terraces and old mills strung out along the west Yorkshire valley — all are physical reminders of the reasons why these railways were built. Of course the places and landscapes associated with particular museum lines do not reflect the entire history of railways any more than the individual collections of more conventional railway museums do. But they are a rich resource that could fire visitors' imagination and encourage them to explore the history of railways and railway travel as social phenomena in the widest sense. Just as with the material culture of objects, these transport-related landscapes and places have diverse meanings. They might be valued for their informational content (Chapter 4 mentioned the value of

179

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spatial relationships and distribution in understanding objects' social context, and the idea can be extended to fixed buildings, structures and landscapes) but in the context of museum railways it is their symbolic value that is perhaps most relevant.57 Economic associations are perhaps most thoroughly understood by scholars, although there is also a considerable and growing body of work on the wider social connotations of landscape and place. Thus studies of English railway towns such as Swindon, Crewe and Derby draw out the spatial dimension to the railways' influence on society and might serve as inspiration for the kind of historical and archaeological work that needs to be done if heritage lines are to interpret critically their own place in the landscape.58 To do this, preservationists need to comprehend their surroundings not only their physical surroundings, but also the social surroundings, that is, the communities through which their railways pass. Ecomuseums provide a model - or perhaps more accurately, a variety of models - of how this might be done. The founding motivations of transport museums and heritage transport overlap with those of the ecomuseum movement, but the latter has always been much more explicit in its holistic comprehension of place and landscape as bearers of identity. In the judgement of Peter Davis, the movement's historian, whatever the differences between them, all ecomuseums attempt 'to conserve and interpret all the elements of the environment... in order to establish the thread of continuity with the past and a sense of belonging'. Ecomuseums are truly history museums without walls - although since some focus needs to be given to the interpretive effort in practical terms it is more realistic to think of them as networks of sites, 'the fragmented museum'. But this is not all. Just as with the meanings of an object, a sense of place is partly inter-subjective, so that it is possible to talk about a location's shared or common identity. Yet equally, not all individuals or social groups share the same sense of place, and so as we described earlier with the Welsh Highland Railway it is important to know whether those who define or experience a site do so as an 'insider' or an 'outsider'. The ecomuseum attempts to empower local communities so that their definition of identity through place and history has a chance of being heard.59 A few lines have already started to make appropriate links. The Ffestiniog Railway, for instance, has for many years worked closely with a museum of slate quarrying. But to interpret holistically a territory needs more than mutual publicity and discounted entrance fees between a couple of museums; it requires a comprehensive approach embracing the many different facets of the region's identity. In some degree, a museum railway that developed as part of an ecomuseum would have to learn to cooperate with other museums and groups that might not share its views of the locale and its history. This is more an opportunity than a threat. An 180

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ecomuseum is rarely, if ever, a monolithic organization swallowing up and controlling its constituents; it is a web of independent bodies sharing a commitment to the exploration of a territory's history and identity, learning from one another in the process. In practical terms, museum railways could attract visitors by moving them around the ecomuseum's territory.60 Ecomuseums' commitment to in situ conservation also presents opportunities for museum lines to become more involved with the interpretation of other facets of transport infrastructure. The surviving viaducts, bridges, tunnels and trackbeds of once-competing but nowclosed railways would benefit from being related in historical terms to operating lines, and the same is true of local waterways and roads. Disused routes might themselves become central features of an ecomuseum. Davis suggests that an ecomuseum of the English northern Pennines could incorporate the disused Stanhope and Tyne Railway, and something similar could be done with the surviving remnants of the horse-drawn tramroads of south-east Wales.61 By embracing the outwardlooking, inclusive philosophy of the ecomuseum movement, heritage railways would throw off once and for all any suggestion that they are just about big boys playing at running trains. Indeed, thinking of heritage railways as potentially elements of ecomuseums — or, at the very least, as museums of a territory or locale — leads back to an important conclusion from the last chapter: that when a transport museum succeeds it ceases to be a museum of transport alone. Mimesis and other modes of heritage transport This chapter has focused on museum railways' potential for making public history. Their specialist and enclosed character permits and even encourages a high degree of mimetic realism, with all its attendant challenges and opportunities. Yet in principle other forms of heritage transport could follow suit, and indeed some have already done so, if generally on a smaller scale. For instance several tram operators around the world have restored or rebuilt short lengths of lines in suburban parks, recalling one feature (if rather atypical) of the operation of big urban systems, the pleasure trip. Britain's National Tramway Museum has gone one step further. Since the 1960s it has been using buildings and fixtures moved from other sites to create a simulacrum of an Edwardian town street several hundred yards long. British trolleybus enthusiasts, frustrated by the lack of any surviving systems upon which to operate, have followed a similar course of action, constructing on an abandoned airfield (and largely with new materials) the beginnings of a 1950s/1960s streetscene. Perhaps in the future old motor buses might also operate through the simulacrum, as 181

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they and other kinds of heritage road transport do on occasion at the National Tramway Mu"seum. Inland waterways bear some comparison with heritage railways. Almost entirely obsolete as commercial routes in Britain by the end of the 1950s, the subsequent redevelopment of canals and navigations as leisure corridors, mostly by the nationalized British Waterways, tended to proceed with comparatively little regard for their historical integrity. Old structures, sites and ways of working were retained partly because deemed of historic interest, but chiefly because they were essential to providing the pleasurable experience of movement on water. Thus for instance modern hydraulic operating gear replaced traditional mechanical devices at many locks, while wharves and other infrastructure marking the waterways' historic role as carriers of goods were often infilled, demolished or redeveloped in an unsympathetic fashion. Of course there were often practical, including financial, reasons why this had to happen, and the more extreme and questionable changes were resisted by those with a historical sensibility.62 In the late 1990s British Waterways formally acknowledged a responsibility for conserving and interpreting the historically significant physical remains of its network. But, just as with heritage railways, financial pressures and the need to cater to the very different needs of modern visitors and users mean that there are continuing practical constraints on what can be achieved by way of conservation. And the presentation of the past in mythical terms, particularly through the conventions of the industrial picturesque, is arguably as egregious as that on any heritage railway. For rather different reasons, as we hinted earlier in this chapter, other forms of heritage transport generally make do with modern infrastructure and facilities. The cost of keeping open, say, a large historic airfield or airport for traffic is usually prohibitive, although in the military sphere it is done, for example, at Duxford and Elvington in Britain, and at Oberschliessheim in Germany. In any case, commercial airports rarely, if ever, fall redundant - although it would be easy enough, at least in physical terms, to recreate the basic facilities associated with the early days of commercial aviation on a greenfield site or at an old military base. A rare example houses the Shuttleworth Collection of operating aircraft at Old Warden in Bedfordshire. By contrast certain kinds of commercial maritime facilities have fallen from ordinary usage, and occasionally they have been kept going for the purposes of heritage transport. While maintaining an old liner terminal in use is financially out of the question, the equivalent of retaining a mainline railway station and its train services, the 'authentic' operation of smaller-scale maritime facilities, such as the wharves and jetties used by coastal shipping, is not beyond the bounds of possibility. Roads are different again. They scarcely ever fall entirely from 182

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use, and in any case the very low cost of accessing modern roads means that there is no incentive for enthusiasts, who often simply wish to drive old vehicles, to build simulated historic roadways with their associated infrastructure such as garages and motels, inns and stables. Nonetheless it can be done, as demonstrated to some degree by those open-air museums which operate their own internal transport. Whether these other modes of heritage transport will ever achieve the degree of mimetic realism associated with museum railways is an open question. Leaving to one side the very real and daunting practical issues such as finance and planning permissions, the answer depends on factors about which there is very little knowledge. Are enthusiasts interested enough in the wider historical circumstances under which their favourite mode of transport operated to wish to 'recreate' them? Would modern visitors be prepared to try the experience' of each and every kind of historic transport? Riding in a steam train or a bus on a metalled road is one thing, but more than a short journey in an ox-drawn wagon along a rutted, muddy track would probably try the patience of most members of the public. But if mimesis does become more widespread as a technique for presenting heritage transport to the public, then the question of how to make living histories that are popular and critical and that connect transport firmly with the wider social context that gave it meaning will prove no less challenging and interesting than it is already doing in the case of railways.

Notes 1. Transport Digest, Summer 2000, 28-30. 2. David Potter, The Talyllyn Rat/way, Newton Abbot, David St John Thomas, 1990, 42—81; David Morgan, 'The Association of Railway Preservation Societies', in Rob Shorland-Ball (ed.), Common Roots - Separate Branches: Railway History and Preservation, Science Museum/National Railway Museum, London, 1994, 156-8; Andrew D. Young, Trolley to the Past: A Brief History and Companion to the Operating Trolley Museums of North America, Interurban Press, Glendale CA, 1983, 35-44; Linn Moedinger, 'The Strasburg Rail Road, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania' in Shorland-Ball (ed.), Separate Roots, 17683; John C. Radcliffe, 'Tramway museums in Australia and New Zealand: crossing the inter-generational boundaries of collecting, interpretation and management', Transport Museums, 19 (1992), 80-6, at 82. 3. Thomas W. Campbell,'The paddlesteamer Enterprise: an aspect of Australian transport history', Transport Museums, 15/16 (1988/89), 137-42; Carsten Prange, 'Preservation problems of museum ships', Transport Museums, 13/14 (1986/87), 48-54. In the 1990s one estimate put the full cost of restoring large ships (those over 125 feet/38 metres in length) at rarely less than £5 million (US$8 183

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4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

million), and even a small vessel such as Waverley could cost £2.5 million (US$4 milllion) to refit. Heritage Lottery Fund, 'Industrial, transport and maritime heritage: review and recommendations on future policy' policy discussion document, March 1998, app. B, paras 4.2, 4.7. Moedinger, 'Strasburg Rail Road', 176. Letter from Alastair Ireland, Chairman, Leadhills and Wanlockhead Railway, Scarlett, R. C, 'The finance and economics of railway preservation', revision of a report originally prepared for Transnet Research, mimeo, 1997. The line attracts about 2000 riders a year. Moedinger, 'Strasburg Rail Road', 177. Peter R. Ovenstone, 'The railway preservation museum in Britain', Transport Museums, 13/14 (1986/87), 69-72, and 'Museum railways: aiming to operate and conserve' Transport Museums, 19 (1992), 53-6; Potter, Talyllyn Railway, 1524; Association of British Transport and Engineering Museums, Newsletter, no. 11 (August 1994), 13-15. Michael Stratton, 'Open-air and industrial museums: windows onto a lost world or graveyards for unloved buildings?', in Michael Hunter (ed.), Preserving the Past: The Rise of Heritage in Modern Britain, Alan Sutton, Stroud, 1996,156-76, at 161. Southern Steam Trust, Consolidated Accounts for the Year Ended 31 December 1998, 2. David Brett, The Construction of Heritage, Cork University Press, Cork, 1996, 8— 9, 38-60, 72, 87; Kevin Walsh, The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Post-Modern World, Routledge, London, 1992, 70, 115; Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary SoaetyVetso, London, 1994, 184-6; Jay Anderson, Time Machines: The World of Living History, American Association for State and Local History, Nashville, 1984; Dean MacCannell, 'Staged authenticity: on arrangements of social space in tourist settings', American journal of Sociology, 79 (1973), 589-603. Roger Melton, A railway Jurassic Park for the Millennium?', Heritage Railway, no. 11 (March 2000), 38-42, at 41. H. John Yates, 'The conservation context', and Steve Pilcher, 'Changing attitudes to the conservation of England's railway heritage', both in Peter Burman and Michael Stratton (eds), Conserving the Railway Heritage, E. & F. N. Spon, London, 1997,121-31,132-40. Neil Cossons,'An agenda for the railway heritage', in Burman and Stratton (eds), Railway Heritage, 3-17, at 12-13. Cossons has envisaged building on this achievement, using state funding to free 'a typical small English branch line' from financial constraints so that it could be 'dedicated primarily . . . to encapsulating in as accurate a manner as possible the operational details and flavour of a railway of the past'. Marilyn Palmer and Peter Neaverson, Industrial Archaeology: Principles and Practice, Routledge, London, 1998, 1-15. 184

Heritage transport as museums 15. Robert B. Gordon, 'The interpretation of artifacts in the history of technology' in Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery (eds), History from Things: Essays on Material Culture, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC, 1993, 74-93, at 90. See also Robert B. Gordon and Patrick M. Malone, The Texture of Industry: An Archaeological View of the Industrialisation of North America, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994, 266-72. 16. Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past in Colonial Williamsburg, Duke University Press, Durham SC, 1997, 70-7; Stratton,'Industrial museums', 158,173-4. 17. Brett, Construction of Heritage, 161. 18. Umberto Eco, trans. William Weaver, Travels in Hyper-Reality, Picador, London, 1986, 3-58; John Urry, The Tourist Ga%e: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies, Sage, London, 1990, 11, 101-2, quote at 11. Perhaps there are only differences of degree between the way some adults engage with museum railways and the delight of children at the hugely popular 'Thomas the Tank Engine' events featuring anthropomorphic steam engines from the imaginary Isle of Sodor. 19. Cf. David Brett's comments on the neo-mediaevalism of the 1830s and 1840s: 'The taste for the medieval both required and was intensified by serious historical and archaeological study of a factual, positivist character . . . even while its enthusiasms were antiquarian.' Construction of Heritage, 17. 20. A small but growing proportion of visitors, even among adults, do need to be told these things, with obvious implications both for safety and the level of interpretation needed. 21. Ralph Harrington, 'Perceptions of the locomotive driver: image and identity on British railways, c.1840—c.1950', www.york.ac.uk/inst/irs/papers/ locodriv.htm, 1999,1-13, at 2. 22. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, Routledge, London, 1995, 111-12. 23. C. David Wilson, 'Preserving identity? railway work in a heritage setting', tss of a paper presented at a conference on Occupational Identity and Railway Work, National Railway Museum, York, September 1999, 22; Brett, Construction of Heritage, 33-4. 24. Julie Wosk, Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick NJ, 1992, 30-66; David Nye, American Technological Sublime, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1994, 45-76; Harrington, 'Locomotive driver', 1-13. None of this means that steam engines are the bearers of contemporary notions of sublimity which, if they relate at all to transport, are more likely the domain of space- and aircraft, high-performance cars and, perhaps, high-speed trains. 25. Harrington, 'Locomotive driver', 8. 26. Ibid., 6-11; Wilson, 'Preserving identity', 7. 27. Wilson, 'Preserving identity' 2, 6-8. 185

Making histories in transport museums 28. In this context it is significant, for example, that in Britain and elsewhere, including the USA, enginemen not only unionized separately from their 'brothers' in other railway grades but have remained so, despite the enormous pressure to amalgamate caused by the rundown of the labour force. 29. Alan Bennett, 'The Great Western Railway and the celebration of Englishness', unpublished DPhil thesis, University of York, 2000; Kumkum Chatterjee,'Discovering India: travel, history and identity in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India', in Baud Ali (ed.), Invoking the Past: The Uses of History in South Asia, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1999, 192-227; Peter Mandler,'"The Wand of Fancy": the historical imagination of the Victorian tourist' in Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward and Jeremy Aynsley (eds), Material Memories: Design and Evocation, Berg, Oxford, 1999, 125-41; William Irwin, The New Niagara: Tourism, Technology and the Landscape of Niagara Falls 1776-1917, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park PA, 1996; Urry, Tourist Ga%e, 1-15; Brett, Construction of Heritage, 38-51. 30. Bob West, 'The making of the English working past: a critical view of the Ironbridge Gorge Museum', and Tony Bennett,'Museums and "the people"' both in Robert Lumley (ed.), The Museum Time-Machine: Putting Cultures on Display, Comedia, London, 1988, 36-62, 63-85, esp. 54-7, 68-73, 77-8. 31. John Stilgoe, Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 1983, 3. 32. Jill Murdoch, 'The railway in Arcadia', Journal of Transport History (forthcoming). 33. Richard Sykes, Alastair Austin, Mark Fuller, Taki Kinoshita and Andrew Shrimpton,'Steam attraction: railways in Britain's national heritage', Journal of Transport History, 18 (1997), 156-75, at 163; railways' publicity leaflets, 1997, 1998; Brett, Construction of Heritage, 21-3, 27. 34. Michael Wallace, quoted in Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 156; Strasburg RR, publicity leaflet, 1997; Swanage Railway, publicity leaflet, 1998; Bennett, 'Great Western Railway'. 35. Jack Simmons, The Railway inTown and Country, 1830-1914, David and Charles, Newton Abbot, 1986, 244-68; Urry, Tourist Ga^e, 16-39; Rachel Holland, 'LNER posters 1923-1947: aspects of iconography, railway and social history', unpublished MA dissertation, University of York, 1999, 58-105. 36. Publicity leaflet, 1998. 37. Stratton, 'Industrial museums', 159-76; Palmer and Neaverson, Industrial Archaeology, 8,16-77. 38. E.g. Hugh Dougherty, 'Missing the point', Heritage Railway, no. 12 (April 2000), 60-1. 39. Robert A. Stebbins, Amateurs, Professionals and Serious Leisure, McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal, 1992. John Winton, The Little Wonder: 150 Years of the Ffestiniog Railway, Michael Joseph, London, 2nd edn, 1986, 201-16; Sykes 186

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40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59.

et al, 'Steam attraction', 162-3; Wilson, 'Preserving identity', 10-12, 17, 22; Dougherty,'Missing the point', 60-1. Brett, Construction of Heritage, 35-6, also 157-60. Sykes etal, 'Steam attraction', 162-3. Wilson, 'Preserving identity', 22. West, 'English working past', 42-3, 47; Gaby Porter, 'Putting your house in order: representations of women and domestic life', in Lumley (ed.), TimeMachine, 102-27. Wilson, 'Preserving identity', 16. The Ffestiniog Railway's policy might most sympathetically be described as consistent with Pugin's rejection (in architecture) of 'mere servile imitations of former excellence of any kind' in favour of new work based on old principles applied to contemporary circumstances. Quoted in Brett, Construction of Heritage~, 18. Ian Carter, 'Steamed up: narrow gauge railways and community development in Gwynedd', unpublished tss. Brett, Construction of'Heritage, 124-5, 161-2; Melton,'Jurassic Park', 38-42. Palmer and Neaverson, Industrial Archaeology, 1—15, 25, 42—4. Brett, Construction of Heritage, 91, 118. Yates, 'Conservation context', 121 31. The Hyde Park Barracks Museum in Sydney does this very effectively. Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 156-62; Handler and Gable, New History, 12969, esp. 131-3,136-7. Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 158. Walsh, Representation of the Past, 101-4; Handler and Gable, New History, 10224. Wilson, 'Preserving identity', 24-5. Brett, Construction of Heritage, 101—2; Palmer and Neaverson, Industrial Archaeology, 1-15, 25, 42-4. Palmer and Neaverson, Industrial Archaeology, 8, 16-29; David Turnock, An Historical Ceography of Britain's Railways, Ashgate, Aldershot, 1999. Palmer and Neaverson, Industrial Archaeology, 16-77; Richard Muir, Approaches to Landscape, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1999, 149-81, 212-43. John Cattell and Keith Falconer, Swindon: The Legacy of a Railway Town, HMSO, London, 1995; Diane Drummond, RailwayTown: Company and People 1840-1914, Scolar Press, Aldershot, 1995; George Revill, 'Migration, mobility and community: Midland Railway headquarters and the railway suburb of Derby 1850-1890', in Colin Divall (comp.), Railway Place and Identity, Working Papers in Railway Studies, no. 2, Institute of Railway Studies, York, 1997, 1-11. See also, Michael Stratton, A bibliographical overview of the railway heritage' in Burman and Stratton (eds), Railway Heritage, 34-57. Peter Davis, Ecomuseums: A Sense of Place, Leicester University Press, London, 1999, 3-79, esp. 5, 18-21, 24 44, 48-9, 51; quotes at 68, 5. 187

Making histories in transport museums 60. Davis, Ecomuseums, 121-4,136,156, 217-46. 61. Charles Blackett-Ord, 'The challenge of disused railway viaducts', in Burman and Stratton (eds), Railway Heritage, 220-8; Davis, Ecomuseums, 156; Stephen R. H. Hughes, The Brecon Forest Tramroads: The Archaeology of an Early Railway System, RCAHM Wales, Aberystwyth, 1991. 62. Roger W. Squires, The New Navvies: A History of the Modem Waterways Restoration Movement, Phillimore, Chichester, 1983, esp. 9-21, 154-71; David Bolton, Race Against Time: How Britain's Waterways Were Saved, Mandarin, London, 1991.

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6 Moving on: a future for transport museums Excellent museums provide inspirational and popular access to the meaning and values of their collections, interpreted for modern society. Victor T. C. Middleton, New Visions for Museums in the 21st Century (AIM, London, 1998), vi

Transport museums have to change to survive. The main challenges they face, at least in the post-industrial societies where the majority is located, are no different from those confronting other museums: structural trends such as increasing competition for visitors' leisure time, changing demographics, static or falling funding from public sources. To these may be added other problems which derive more from the peculiarities of transport collections such as the changing nature of transport technology and the difficulties of guaranteeing the long-term survival of vehicles, ^et the future for history in transport museums is a bright one. As we observed at the beginning of this book 'the past' continues, for a multitude of reasons, to exert a powerful hold on the imagination of a very significant proportion of the population, and transport museums should be able to build on this general interest to engage a growing audience for their particular concerns. Indeed one of the structural trends that seem to threaten all museums may come to the aid of transport museums, namely the increasing proportion of people's leisure time taken up in what George Ritzer calls 'cathedrals of consumption' — shopping malls, theme parks, and selfcontained urban resorts embracing hotels, casinos, shops, themed restaurants and so on. Ritzer argues that the very success of these facilities in creating a sense of quasi-religious 'enchantment' through their spectacular entertainments leads more or less inevitably to the standardization and routinization of their products and activities, with a consequential loss of appeal.1 In the longer term then transport museums could secure their future by providing opportunities for a public disenchanted with the more superficial aspects of consumption to discover and reflect on the past for whatever reason — as an educational pursuit in its own right, as an aspect of discovering one's own sense of identity and belonging, as a way of coming to more informed choices about the future of transport. Victor Middleton, the distinguished commentator on British museums policy, advocates that museums offer these opportunities for informal 189

Making histories in transport museums learning as an integral part of the facilities in cathedrals of consumption, providing an element of community involvement and sense of place as a way of combating the 'fundamental sameness of most of these retail/leisure developments'.2 STEAM! the Museum of the Great Western Railway, which opened in the summer of 2000 at the heart of a massive new shopping centre built on the site of Swindon's old railway workshops, may prove to be merely the first of a generation of transport museums to exploit such opportunities. But there are dangers as well, particularly if the new museums and their exhibitions depend in any measure on commercial sponsorship. The history of such involvement (outlined in Chapter 3) suggests (although it does not prove) that in developing exhibitions museum workers will find it hard to maintain a critical distance from the interests of their paymasters. Finding new and better ways to represent transport's history and that of the wider society that originally gave it meaning is a key to the present survival and future vitality of transport museums. This is not enough, of course. All museums also need to provide better marketing, develop more imaginative management of resources and staff, enhance their lobbying of politicians, pay greater attention to raising revenue, cooperate more with each other and with other organizations such as universities, and so on. But ultimately all these activities are justified by transport museums' core activities as sites of public history — collecting, conserving, displaying and interpreting objects and other kinds of evidence about the past for the benefit of this and future generations. There will always be a place for transport museums aimed at circles of specialists and enthusiasts who are prepared to fund their own interests and passions. Such museums do not have to attend to the challenges of making histories, for their visitors already know everything, or almost everything, they want to about the collection: to recall and generalize Clay McShane's remark about visits to motor museums, for the 'devotee . . . the point... is ritual, not intellectual'.3 In such transport museums the objectrich formalist displays analysed in Chapter 2 are likely to remain the norm. They have the advantage of being cheap to prepare, and labels focusing on the technical-functional details and provenance of the objects displayed provide everything that the true devotee needs or wants to know. One may be tempted to lament the attenuated sense of the past that often seems to be bound up with such displays, but even this impulse should be checked until future research provides a better idea of the motivations and beliefs of those who provide and use them. In any case it is quite possible that such transport museums will remain the most common type, and, given the sizeable number of transport enthusiasts in countries such as Britain and the US, collectively these museums will continue to serve a significant audience.

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Transport museums aimed chiefly at enthusiasts and other specialists are then not likely to be the ones where the most interesting work is done by exhibitors. Conveying a sense of transport's past is more challenging and more rewarding - when the audience is not one that is particularly knowledgeable about or even interested in the subject. While there are no reliable estimates of the proportion of visitors to transport museums worldwide who are not specialists, it is certainly large. In the late 1990s it was thought that, across the British museum sector as a whole, only one in four visitors to any particular museum had a detailed knowledge of the subject or an informed interest in the collections; more than two-thirds of visitors were merely interested in a general way, visiting in preference to alternative ways of spending their leisure. This estimate is roughly consistent with the visitor profile at the NRM in the mid-1990s; 55 per cent of visitors were there because they had a general interest in museums or simply wanted a good day out. It seems unlikely that the picture in other post-industrial societies is much different, although, as with so many other factors with a bearing on the making of histories in transport museums, more research is needed to correct the deficit between what is known and what needs to be known.4 It is this general audience of people intent on an enjoyable day out that transport museums need to defend and grow. Of course, exhibitors have long been trying to reach and engage such visitors and would-be visitors. As we argued in Chapter 3, the move in the 1970s and 1980s away from dry, dull even, serried ranks of vehicles towards exhibitions that explored aspects of the social context of transport's past was driven partly by a hunch that these subjects and themes would be of wide appeal. Despite the problems associated with these exhibitions - their often dubious ideological connotations, their exclusion of marginalized social groups, and their sometimes rather uninspiring, overly didactic techniques — the shift to social history was basically a necessary and appropriate response to the changing audience for transport museums. The exhibitionary philosophy we advocate in Chapter 4 builds on the positive apects of this older way of contextualizing transport. We believe that general visitors remain interested in social history but that they are most likely to engage with its themes when these are introduced through the medium of objects. Finding ways to make social histories of transport through vehicles and other objects is, one hopes, interesting work for exhibitors, but the rationale of the material culture approach lies ultimately with its potential to help visitors help themselves to appreciate the past. A similar comment applies to the interpretation of heritage railways as meaningful sites and routes that can be 'read' and understood by visitors who have been given the confidence and cognitive tools to do so. Developing a philosophy of exhibiting based on the insights of 191

Making histories in transport museums

material culture is the easy part of creating a new generation of transport museums. The practical difficulties are substantial, but not impossible to overcome. Funding is likely to remain a severe constraint for the foreseeable future, although it is almost impossible to generalize across national boundaries. In Britain it seems likely that the major national museums will have to survive on slowly declining levels of recurrent public funding, supplemented by whatever can be raised from visitor charges, marketing initiatives (including corporate sponsorship and entertainment), and bursts of capital investment from quasi-public agencies such as the Heritage Lottery Fund. Smaller collections will struggle on with their traditional and often rather precarious sources of recurrent funding. While the capital sums available in the late 1990s were comparatively generous, they were - and are - tailored to particular projects. This is not necessarily a bad thing as it both forces museums to be clear about their objectives and makes the priorities of grant-giving agencies transparent. These factors have together contributed to a renewed interest in tackling the perennial problems of long-term storage and conservation of vehicles and other large objects. But at the very least, when developing new displays transport exhibitors will have to learn to adapt rapidly to the changing requirements of funding agencies that are sure of the political need for ever greater Value for money' and yet uncertain of the social benefits they wish museums to provide. There is a danger that a decline in recurrent funding might bring a reduction in the diversity of interpretive strategies as transport museums play safe in the search for the greater visitor numbers and income they need to survive. On the other hand, the same competitive pressures might, if imaginatively directed by museum directors and trustees, encourage exhibitors to devise novel and more socially inclusive ways of making histories that could attract external funding. People of colour, for example, might be more inclined to visit transport museums if the important contributions of these groups to transport industries in the past and present were more widely acknowledged. Other challenges are rooted in the peculiarities of transport collections. In the medium-to-long term the changing nature of transport technology might have an important influence on the nature of museums, at least insofar as they remain dominated by collections of vehicles. Standardization is reducing technological variety on the railways, in the air, on the roads and at sea. This might be welcome to curators hard pressed to find shelter even for existing collections. On the other hand it is arguable that in the future visitors will find the reduced variety monotonous, and that the arcane nature of much modern technology will pose fresh challenges in terms of interpretation. Perhaps, too, visitors will be uninterested in the bland efficiency of diesel or electric multiple units 192

A future for transport museums

on the railway, computer-controlled and fuel-injected cars, almost indistinguishable aircraft. But these arguments are far from certain - the nostalgic impulse as each maturing generation (or at least the male half) turns to the transport of its youth seems to be a constant. Diesel locomotives once scorned by 1960s steam-age trainspotters as boring boxes-on-wheels now find an honoured place in the museum hall; small, mass-produced cars of the 1970s attract admiring glances from middle-aged family men. Museums of particular, long-obsolete modes of transport might find it hard to maintain attendance (some carriage and wagon museums experience this as a problem), but as a sector transport museums do not necessarily face a decline in public interest grounded in nostalgia.5 In any case one should not concentrate too much on technological standardization, for to do so is to fall into the trap of regarding objects only as things-in-themselves or as vehicles for nostalgic contemplation of a regressive kind. Modern transport and travel are probably more complex and arguably have a greater impact on ordinary people's day-to-day lives and the natural environment than at any other point in history. Helping people to make sense of these activities should be an important function of transport museums, now and in the future. They can help people to form views on the way that transport ought to develop, while eventually of course today's transport will itself become history. Even when a museum is interested primarily in dealing with the present and the future there is a place for a historical perspective — as we hope the very structure of this book demonstrates. An understanding of how and why things have come to be as they are is an important part of comprehending future opportunities and constraints. There is no reason to suppose that the object-focused approach to interpretation we have advocated should not play a growing role, for the social complexity of modern transport is marked in material ways. Thus, for example, while just two or three different basic kinds of diesel train are sufficient to operate the non-electrified regional railway passenger services in Britain, these standard units are painted in a wide variety of increasingly lurid liveries by the many private companies that operate (but do not own) them. Transport museums would also benefit by thinking more deeply about how they relate to one another and to heritage transport. As discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, most museums have concentrated on particular modes. This makes it difficult to develop exhibitions that explore the relationships, both cooperative and competitive, between different kinds of transport. While in the ideal world there would be more general, multimodal museums, it is unlikely, at least in the short to medium term, that this will happen. (It might prove an attractive option in the longer term, particularly for smaller museums and those that face difficulties in maintaining public interest in long obsolete forms of transport. Merging 193

Making histories in transport museums collections of trams and trolleybuses, for instance, makes a lot of sense historiographically and practically.) But transport museums could, at very little cost, do more to make visitors to a particular museum aware of the collections, exhibitions and facilities for informal and formal learning to be found elsewhere. This could also be done profitably within each transport mode. In some ways a national museum has a different role to play than a regional, company or local museum (each tends to comprehend, for example, a different kind of group identity) but these are complementary not competing functions, and so it makes sense to strengthen links. This already happens to a degree. The NRM has long loaned items from its reserve collection to other museums and heritage railways, and increasingly the policy has been whenever possible to place items in historically appropriate locations. But much more could be done in terms of exhibitions, so that for example, when an object from a particular region or company is displayed, visitors are made aware of other collections, exhibitions and museums that would enable its history to be explored more thoroughly. This principle might also be extended to whole subject areas that individual museums treat only in passing or not at all. For example, STEAM! the Museum of the Great Western Railway covers the history of railway manufacturing and repair more comprehensively than the NRM. And perhaps conventional transport museums ought to embrace the ecomuseum ideal - as indeed at least two have, in Sweden and Switzerland - so that, where and when appropriate, visitors are made more aware of how transport and travel fit into a territory's wider history.6 Ultimately, though, transport museums will succeed as history museums only if they provide visitors with ways to learn informally about the past and, more particularly, about the social needs which have always provided transport's justification and meaning. We remain convinced that for the overwhelming majority of visitors, on-site exhibitions will be the main way in which critical popular histories of transport are made, for all that these will be supplemented by digital environments and other novel ways of accessing collections.7 But a lot remains to be done before transport museums can be celebrated as sites of critical popular display. Making exhibitions that are subversive of contemporary myths about the past is a fairly straightforward task, assuming that exhibitors are willing to learn the necessary historiography. Making critical histories that are also popular, that engage and sustain their audiences' interest, is very much harder. It implies that museum exhibitors have to know their audiences very well indeed, better than most do currently - there is a very profound 'knowledge deficit' between what transport museums do know and what they need to know if they are to think strategically.8 Intellectually, it would be interesting to discover more about the sense of the past that visitors

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gain from their experience of transport exhibitions, about their priorities for future exhibitions and displays, and why some people choose not to visit transport museums at all. But knowing all of this is quite simply essential for making displays that sustain a dialogue between the expert knowledge of exhibitors and the lay knowledge and diverse concerns of the general public. Research aimed at lifting the heavy veil of ignorance must be a priority. Notes 1. George Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Revolutionising the Means of Consumption, Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks CA, 1999. 2. Victor T. C. Middleton, New Visions for Museums in the 21st Century, Association of Independent Museums, London, 1998, 53-64, quote at 58. 3. Clay McShane, 'Exhibit review of the Museo Dell' Automobile Carlo Biscaratti Di Ruffia', Radical History Review, 551 (1991), 107-13. 4. Middleton, New Visions for Museums, 43-6, 53; NRM visitor survey 1996, appendix. 5. Jeff Powell, 'Visitor interest in transport museums', Transport Museums, 24 (1998), 90-2. 6. Peter Davis, Ecomuseums: A Sense of Place, Leicester University Press, London, 1999,121-4,136. 7. See e.g. Suzanne Keene, Bruce Royan and David Anderson (eds), A Netful of jewels: New Museums in the Learning Age, National Museums Directors' Conference, London, 1999; Middleton, New Visions for Museums, 35-8. 8. Middleton, New Visions for Museums, 8.

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Index

Page numbers in italic refer to illustrations.

bus services 102 buses, as heritage transport 161

Adelaide (Australia) 160 Advanced Passenger Train (APT) \T, aircraft 1, 56, 91,121-2, 161, 182 analyst displays 82 archaeology, industrial 118, 164, 179 archaeometry 128—9 art, transport in 120 artefacts 114-53 and social constructivism 141—51 and visitors' decoding 137-40 Asia 1 Australia 1,178 Auto und Technik Museum, Germany 2 aviation, see aircraft Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Museum 54,79 Basalla, George 64—5 Battlefield Line, Leicestershire 169 Berlin Museum of Transport and Technology 80, 138 bicycles development 63-4,122-3, 136-7 in Manchester exhibition 141-3 Bluebell Railway, East Sussex 168-S BMW, as corporate sponsor 95 boats, as heritage transport 160, 161 books-on-the-wall 103-7, 116-17 Bowes Railway 170 Bridport railway, Gateshead, Dorset, 102 Britain 1, 162, 192 and social history 78-9 British Transport Commission 78, 145 217

California State Railroad Museum 2, 79, 106 cars 45,116-17, 161 Channel Tunnel exhibition 96 circulation patterns 174—7 class, and perception of railway workers 167 classification 42—6 coding, transport 58-64 collection 42-9 collections 192-3 importance 106 commercial aircraft 122 complete collections, challenge of 46-7 contextual history, as academic discipline 91 corporate sponsorship 95-6, 97 Corvette museum, Kentucky 47 Cossons, Neil 163 culture, significance 126, 131, 132 Danish National Museum of Science and Technology, Elsinore 50, 56 decoding, material culture 117 dioramas, use 60-1, 100 displays, use 176-7 diversity at local level 101-3 and national level 100-1 docents, use 177 drama, use 177

Index Durango and Silverton Railroad, USA 179 Duxford Airfield, Cambridgeshire 182 ecomuseums 180-1,194 Elvington Airfield, North Yorkshire 182 engineering analysis 129 engineering taxonomy 44 Enola Gay exhibition, Washington, DC 94, 97, 98 Enterprise (Australia) 160 Eurotunnel, as corporate sponsor 96 exhibiting, politics of 92-7 exhibition, contrasting approaches to 49-58 exhibitions as artefacts 146-7 reading 6-8 explainers, use 177 Ffestiniog Railway, Gwynedd 150, 173,179,180 films, transport in 120 finance and methods of display 56 prospects 192 footplate experience courses 178 formalism 49, 50,119,190 as technological utopianism 64-70 and vehicles 41-2, 54, 56 Foxfield Railway, Cumbria 170 freight lines, and myth in heritage railways 170 Greece, ancient, influence of 132, 133 Harper, J. B. 45 Helsingor 50, 56 Henry Ford Museum, Detroit 141 heritage, role 3—4 Heritage Motor Centre, West Midlands 52

Heritage Railway Association, UK 160 heritage railways 2,160,161 mythic structure 165-70 route interpretation 178-81 heritage transport 159-88 and mimesis 181-3 and museum railways 163-5 museums 1, 2 and 'the past' 159-62 historiography 98-9,118-20,121 history, role 3-4 HT Museum, Copenhagen 54, 55 Hull Municipal Museum, Yorkshire 45 images, artefacts as 125,132 impact history 90-1 indicators, artefacts as 125,132-3 industrial archaeology 118,164,179 industrial society, and myth 168 industry, and railways 179-81 inland waterways 79, 91,161,182 instruments, artefacts as 125-30 Ireland 1 Keighley and Worth Valley Railway, Yorkshire 168,171,179 Kent and East Sussex Railway 171 label exhibition, scope 49 labelling, and coding 59 landscape, and myth 167—70 Leadhills and Wanlockhead Railway, Lanarkshire 162 learning, and objects 124-5 Leighton Buzzard Railway, Bedfordshire 170 light aircraft 121-2 living history, use 177 local museums, role 95 locomotives 44-5, 62-3,129,130,131 logos, as referents 133, 134 London to Brighton car rally 160 London Design Museum 63 London Transport Museum 58, 79, 94,106 218

Index Lynton and Barnstaple Railway, Devon 143-51 Mallard, steam locomotive 66, 67, 68 maritime museums 1 market, museums knowledge of 194 mass exhibition, scope 49, 50 material culture 114-53 railway carriage as 143 role 115-18 materials analysis 128-9 Mayr, Otto 93 meaning, visitors decoding 137—40 Melbourne, Australia 160 Mercedes-Benz Museum, as corporate sponsor 95 Middleton Railway, Leeds 170 mimesis 163-5,181-3 motor museums 81-2 motor vehicles, and status 133 multimodal museums, prospects 193-4 Musee Fran^ais du Chemin de Per, Mulhouse 54, 80 Musee National de TAutomobile, Mulhouse 52, 53, 80 Museum of British Transport, Clapham, South London 50, 51, 52 museum railways 163-5,170-8 Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester 141 Museum of Transport, Glasgow 52, 138,141 Mystic Seaport, Connecticut, USA 2 myth 3-4, 97,194 and museum railways 165—70 and National Railway Museum 86,87 and Swiss Museum of Transport and Communication 101 narrative conventions 60, 61, 86 National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC, see Smithsonian National Diesel Railcar Museum 47

National Endowment for the Humanities, USA 81 National Fishing Heritage Centre, Lincolnshire 79 National Maritime Museum, Greenwich 94 National Motor Museum, Hampshire 2, 79, 96 National Motorcyle Museum, Birmingham 52, 54 National Railway Museum (NRM), York 2, 46,115-16,126,190, 194 and books-on-the-wall 104,105 displays 54, 66-70,138,143-51 funding 94,96 precursor collection 45 and social history 78, 79, 81, 83-90 The Warehouse 56, 57 National Tramway Museum, Derbyshire 2,94 and heritage transport 181,182 and social history 78 National Waterways Museum, Gloucester 79 nationhood 66, 83,100,101 New Orleans 160 New South Wales State Rail Museum 50,56 New York 130 New York Transit Museum 80 nostalgia 71 novels, transport in 120 Oakwood Library of Railway History, UK 102 Oberschliessheim, Bavaria 182 object analysis 133—7 objects, see artefacts open-air museums 183 Otto buffer (Germany) 160 outreach, place of 99 Paignton and Dartmouth railway, Devon 162 Pepper's ghosts 100

219

Index Petersen Automotive Museum, Los Angeles 52, 79,138 photographs 146-7,148,149-50 place, and myth in heritage railways 167-70 politics of exhibiting 92-7 popular culture 6 Puffing Billy Railway, Victoria, Australia 2 Pump House, Manchester 116 Queen Mary, Long Beach, California 160 race issues 173, 192 Rail Road Museum of Pennsylvania 2, 54, 79 Railroaders Memorial Museum, Pennsylvania 80 railways buildings 174-7 carriage, as exhibit 143-51 museums 1, 54 tickets 139-40 towns 180 workers 165-7 see also heritage railways; locomotives referents, artefacts as 125, 133 regional museums 95 road transport 91-2 road vehicles, see cars roads, as heritage transport 182-3 royalty, and NRM 87, 88, 89-90 St Louis Museum of Transportation 2 San Francisco, tramways 160 scholarship, and visitors 97-9 Scholes, John 145 Science Museum, London 43, 78, 96 sea transport 160, 161, 182 sea-going vessels 152-3,160,161 seaside, and heritage railways 169 semiotics 39-42, 133 Sheppard, Thomas 45 signs, artefacts as 125

simulation, as convention 60 Sittingbourne and Kemsley Light Railway, Kent 170 Smithsonian Museum, Washington, DC 45, 80 National Air and Space Museum 2,94-5 and Enola Gay exhibition 94, 97, 98 social constructivism 121-4, 133-7 bicycles 141-3 railway carriage 143-51 social context 48-50 social history 78-113,121,191 social narrative 119 Southern Steam Trust 162 sponsorship, corporate 95-6, 97 Stanhope and Tyne Railway, County Durham 181 STEAM!, Swindon 190,194 Steamtown National Historic Site, Pennsylvania 81 Stockholm, Vasamuseet 152-3 Strasburg Rail Road, Pennsylvania 2,160,161,162,168,169 streetcars 47,48 see also trams Swanage Railway, Dorset 103, 162, 168,169-70 Sweden 152-3,194 Swindon 180,190,194 Swiss Museum of Transport and Communication, Lucerne 56, 80, 100-1 Switzerland, ecomuseums 194 symbols, artefacts as 125,130-2 Talyllyn Railway, Gwynedd 160 Tanfield Railway, Durham 170 taxonomy 42—6 technological utopianism 64-71 technology, and historiography 118-24 thematic exhibitions 49-50, 54 tourism, and heritage railways 167-70 Toyota Museum, Japan 52

220

Index tramroads, potential use 181 trams 47,181,193-4 Tramway Museum Society 47 tramway museums 1 tramways 160 transport collection and classification 42-6 encoding and decoding 58—61 and historiography 118-24 whiggish histories 62-4 transport museums function 1 future 189-95 transport objects, and learning 124-5 trolleybuses 181, 193-4 Turner, J. M.W. 120 typology, see classification tyres, bicycle 142 United Kingdom, see Britain United States 1,178 and social history 79-80, 81 utopianism, technological 64—71

private ownership 160—1 video, use 86 Vintage Carriages Trust, Yorkshire 79 visitors 2-6, 61, 70-1, 97-9 visual conventions 60 Volkswagen, as corporate sponsor 95 volunteers, and heritage railways 171-2 Wales, tramroads 181 Watercress Railway, Hampshire 168-9 waterways, inland 79, 91, 161, 182 Watkins, J. Elfreth 45 Waverley (Glasgow) 160 Welsh Highland Railway, Gwynedd 173 whiggish viewpoint 62-4 women 87, 105,172-3 York Queen Street exhibition 50 see also National Railway Museum (NRM),York

Vasamuseet, Stockholm 152-3 vehicles collection and exhibition 39-42

Zeppelin

221

95