Making Histories in Transport Museums (review)

The world of transport museums is large and varied. Transport museums are among the most numerous of museums, and among the most visited; they are also among the least understood, being frequently dismissed as the products of narrow-minded, unprofessional collectors "obsessed with technology." Actually, as Colin Divall and Andrew Scott observe, they have developed from quite diverse origins and work within a range of interpretive styles. While Divall and Scott do not minimize the shortcomings of transport museums, they do argue that many so-called problems reflect practical challenges inherent in collecting and conserving large artifacts.

This is the first book in thirty years to take a serious look at transport museums, the approach combining scholarship with the authors' personal experience. Their narrative and analysis is developed in six chapters. The first, "Transports of Delight: Museums, Visitors and Enthusiasts," provides an overview of the varied origins and development of transport museums around the world. Divall and Scott look at different organizational structures and approaches to exhibitry. They discuss visitation and consider what visitors bring with them to museums in the way of preconceptions and expectations.

The second chapter, "Trains, Planes, Cars and Boats: Collecting and Displaying Vehicles," discusses the traditional whiggish approach to exhibiting artifacts, with text limited to technical factoids, the basis for the stereotype of transport museums that celebrate objects in isolation and imbue displays with a progressivist air. The third chapter, "Travels in the Past: Exhibiting Social Histories of Transport," discusses exhibits in which artifacts assume a role subordinate to interpretive text. Such exhibits have become much more common in transport museums in recent years, and this is certainly a valuable approach, but also one fraught with limitations—especially the limitations of the "book on the wall" that few visitors actually have the patience to read, or the interest.

The fourth chapter, "Theories and Things: History and the Changing Role of the Object," explores ideas for a "new generation" of object-centered interpretive exhibits. This chapter is mostly theoretical, for so far only a handful of such exhibits exist. The fifth chapter, "To Travel Hopefully . . .: Heritage Transport as Museums," is much more concrete. It addresses interpretive experiences involving operating equipment, the "living history" that can provide visitors with insights that are generally elusive with static display.

The final chapter is titled "Moving On: A Future for Transport Museums" and calls for museums to inform the content of exhibits with solid information about what visitors expect and what they can be expected to learn. Making Histories does not pretend to be definitive. Rather, it aims to take a preliminary look at transport museums, analyze what they are attempting to do and how they are going about it, and assess the successes and failures of different approaches. In these terms, it succeeds admirably and is bound to be informative to anyone involved with transport museums.