Tourism and the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility

This third International Conference of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility (T² M) productively focused on that third and crucial 'T' word – tourism – in a three-day event encompassing nearly ninety papers.

Given the focus on tourism, an old Butlin's holiday camp with 'King of the Road', 'Midnight Plane to Georgia' and '24 hours from Tulsa' on the jukebox might have been a stylish venue. But just as appropriately the conference took place at the National Railway Museum, York. In trekking to our seminar rooms and plenary halls we hourly passed by a turntable of towering scarlet and green liveried steam dragons that are now exhibition artefacts but once transported tourists over the world's railway tracks.

The radical changes currently happening in transport historiography were clear at this conference. It is far from being a forum for nerds to obsess about the design of railway engines or local government policy on the routing of tram tracks. 'Vehicular reductionism' is over. Instead people are approaching the subject from many other disciplines, particularly cultural studies. Many papers demonstrated how the politics of space and place, consumption and consumerism mattered as much as transport's representations and regulation. Gender and race were crucially addressed. Meaning and interpretation were omnipresent concepts as we discussed how tourists constructed, and were constructed by, transport patterns and systems.

Plenary speakers and others posed some illuminating binaries. Should mobility be seen as a sub-discipline of transport, or the other way round? Perhaps holding both views together could be even more enlightening. Can transport historians be characterized as experts obsessed by nuts and rivets, in contrast to tourism historians as amateurs who create inaccurate and impressionistic post-modern texts about hotels and beaches? Well, sometimes, but fortunately attendees from what could be seen as opposing corners managed to have remarkably fruitful dialogues.

And of course comparison is so useful. Many welcomed John Walton's call for international and inter-modal work, and a cluster of interesting papers explored how rail did, or did not, 'open up' different developing countries such as India, Austria, New Zealand and France, as well as its impact on the development of national identity. George Stephenson statues might grace German stations, but there was no simple story, warned Ian Kerr, of UK rail technology 'awakening backward countries from their slumbers' everywhere. There had been a negotiated use of railway technology, not blanket acceptance of British ways. Technology, he pointed out, was a mediating, not an independent variable. It develops, as Marxists hold, in a particular set of circumstances. Actually, as speakers from other countries, such as Ian Carter, noted, developing countries had often ditched the British model, and negotiated a technology more appropriate to local conditions. Norway, for example, had kept UK-style railway bureaucracy, but adapted Swedish rail technology. In many cases railways' sinews (or tentacles) had extended colonial space into indigenous space and promoted nationalism and imperialism. According to Gunther Dinhobl, railways provided a visual demonstration of nation building. In Austria the advance of personal mobility as trains developed was related to a discovery of the national, located self.

Despite these useful inter-cultural explorations, inter-modal work was less well represented, and rail dominated to the detriment of road, sea and air travel. Exceptions to this included Bernadette Gonzalves's discussion of how Hawaii's scenic Hana Highway is produced by sightseers and protesting locals; and Gordon Pirie's paper on the ways that South African air travel in 1930s allowed literal transcendence of littoral travel, as well as providing a new viewing platform for scenic photographers. Waterborne travel was included in papers on canals, ships' stewardesses, and coastal summer homes.

To me the most path-breaking work paid attention to gender as a useful category of analysis in transport. A particularly strong example of this was Di Drummond's presentation on how railway advertising was designed to appeal specifically to women passengers in the US and UK 1890–1965. The central idea was that technology had to be mediated in three ways for women. Firstly, images of different...