{"title":"Finding the archival traces of “misery trains”: Early accounts of train transport before the Holocaust","authors":"Christine Schmidt","doi":"10.1177/00225266241249133","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00225266241249133","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses a collection of eyewitness accounts by survivors of Nazi persecution gathered in the mid-1950s by the Wiener Library in London, narratives that were elicited about lived experiences of railway transport and trauma, as well as the implication of railway personnel and structures in resistance activities. The accounts provide an opportunity to interrogate early postwar narratives that reveal emerging constructions of refugee identity, agency, and survival through key memories deemed particularly “valuable” to the Library, an institution created by Jewish refugees who fled Nazi persecution. Through a case study approach framed by Ketelaar's distinction between archivalisation and archivisation, this paper argues that narratives of trauma, displacement and resistance associated with deportation by train were of special interest to Library staff already in the 1950s. This is striking due to a lack of scholarly focus on these themes until decades later. The recent publication of the collection as a digital resource has the potential to further expand and recontextualise “tacit narratives” of transport embedded in the collection.","PeriodicalId":501587,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Transport History","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140933730","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A nostalgic trip? Klaus Rifbjerg’s “På Sporet af den Tabte Vogn” and the Copenhagen tramway","authors":"Adam Borch","doi":"10.1177/00225266241241906","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00225266241241906","url":null,"abstract":"For much of the twentieth century, the tramway was the most important public transport system in Copenhagen, Denmark. It played a crucial role in the life of the city and features strongly in Danish art and literature produced during the network's lifespan as well as after it was finally closed in 1972. Despite this, the tramway has only received scarce scholarly attention. This article looks to address the situation. It does so by drawing attention to the fact that although the tramway was shut down, it lived on in art and literature. One example of this is “På Sporet af den Tabte Vogn” (1985) written by Klaus Rifbjerg. This short story has often been described as nostalgic. While this is not a misreading, it is an assessment that requires clarification. A close reading that draws on studies of nostalgia reveals that the short story does not boil down to a sentimental longing for a lost past. Rather, it thematises nostalgia for the Copenhagen tramway, questioning such remembrances’ status and relevance in contemporary society. This means that, ultimately, the short story can be seen as part of a broader tendency in writing about closures of electric public transport networks in Western Europe and North America: it works as a counternarrative to notions of progress, an antidote to predominant ideas of urban development in the mid-twentieth century.","PeriodicalId":501587,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Transport History","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140601238","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Railing through reality: Trains and mobility in Victorian ghost stories","authors":"Alicia Barnes","doi":"10.1177/00225266241238639","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00225266241238639","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the multifaceted cultural history of ghost trains in Victorian fiction by situating three little-known ghost stories in the publishing and social history of the second half of the nineteenth century. The figure of the ghost train offers a route into the entangled history of publishing and railways by contextualising the anxieties presented in railway ghost stories with the real-world experiences of passengers. Taking ideas of mobility as a focal point, this paper brings together discussions of virtual travel and the supernatural to demonstrate some of the impact railways had on reading and writing about train travel. More so than tales of other haunted transport technologies, it is the ghost train's unnatural capacity for movement that disturbs both passengers and readers. By both enhancing and warping reality, railways are ripe source material for Victorian ghost stories to entertain and demand questions of spatio-temporal experience from their reading passengers.","PeriodicalId":501587,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Transport History","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140601362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Passages and rebates: Colonial officers and the shift from sea to air travel in the 1940s","authors":"Ronen Shamir","doi":"10.1177/00225266241233721","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00225266241233721","url":null,"abstract":"Passengers seldom appear in historical accounts as having their own role in the development of civil aviation. This study identifies a particular class of air-travellers: colonial officers and their families, stationed throughout the British Empire, who in the late 1940s drove a shift to the air at a time of an acute crisis in shipping accommodations. The drive from sea to air relied on an administrative infrastructure which was created by the Crown Agents for the Colonies on the basis of their earlier agreements with shipping companies. The Crown Agents administered the passage of colonial officers and negotiated a rebate agreement with British Overseas Airways Corporation in 1949. The study concludes that the history of civil aviation and the shift from sea to air travel depended not only on technological improvements but also on passengers whose practices normalised air-travel.","PeriodicalId":501587,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Transport History","volume":"181 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140298936","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"New behavioural economics and its influence on USA passenger airline management and policies","authors":"Kenneth John Button","doi":"10.1177/00225266241239154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00225266241239154","url":null,"abstract":"The essay examines the history of interactions between academic thinkers and the application of their ideas to airline management and policy. Many studies of the history of transport focus on developments in engineering hardware and business models underlying its use, together with historical biographies of the key individuals involved. Here I deviate from this to look at how, over the past half-century or so, ideas emanating from the new behavioural economics have permeated the way air transport markets, and their regulation, have developed. I consider the outcomes on air carriers and their markets of efforts at combining psychology and economics into matters concerning airline management and policy formulation. It looks at the ways in which the traditional economic framework that dominated much of the thinking about commercial air transport from the 1920s has been challenged over the past 50 years and the implications of this for carriers and passengers.","PeriodicalId":501587,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Transport History","volume":"273 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140299157","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pedalling in Pahlavi Iran: Cycle mobility and competing masculinities","authors":"Mikiya Koyagi","doi":"10.1177/00225266241234531","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00225266241234531","url":null,"abstract":"Using Persian memoirs, periodicals, and photographs, this essay examines how Iranians integrated the bicycle into their everyday lives in the rapidly changing socioeconomic contexts of the Pahlavi period (1925–1979). It seeks to achieve two goals. First, by drawing comparisons from different geographical contexts, it illustrates how Iran's comparatively belated encounter with bicycle technology shaped its use and social meanings, revealing the agency of consumers of small technologies in the global South. Second, by examining competing ideals of manhood associated with the bicycle, it expands Middle Eastern historiography on masculinity beyond the modern middle class. As growing Iranian working-class men developed peculiar aesthetics and practices around the bicycle that distinguished themselves from modern middle-class men, cycle mobility became highly contested along class and gender lines, raising aspirations and anxieties in the Iranian urban space.","PeriodicalId":501587,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Transport History","volume":"127 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140075106","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: Iran in Motion. Mobility, Space, and the Trans-Iranian Railway by Mikiya Koyagi","authors":"Sara Zanotta","doi":"10.1177/00225266241238386","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00225266241238386","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":501587,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Transport History","volume":"54 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140074946","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Transport users, and historie(s) of transport: ‘A view from below’","authors":"Aparajita Mukhopadhyay","doi":"10.1177/00225266231217895","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00225266231217895","url":null,"abstract":"This article proposes a methodological departure. It makes a case for foregrounding interactions between users and transport systems as a methodological departure to move beyond institutional perspectives in history of transport. This wider point is examined in this article through the illustrative example of how at an everyday level users negotiate/contest exclusionary practices and transport disadvantage. The article acknowledges the challenges of this methodological shift, especially the difficulties of recovering ‘everyday’ experiences of transport users. It also recognises that users’ mediation and responses sit at the interstices of operational policies of transport infrastructure, individual/collective agency, and the workings of capital. Notwithstanding these caveats, the article suggests that innovative and explicit foregrounding of transport users has the potential to disaggregate the institutional perspective in writing histories of transport.","PeriodicalId":501587,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Transport History","volume":"59 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138952979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: Elbeschiffe für den neuen Staat. Die Abtretungen deutscher Schleppdampfer und Kähne an die Tschechoslowakei – Zur 100sten Wiederkehr des Jahrestages des „Elbe“-Schiedsspruchs von Paris vom 14. Juni 1921 [Elbe Ships for the New State. The Cessions of German Tugboats and Barges to Czechoslovakia - On the 100th Anniversary of the \"Elbe\" Arbitral Decree of Paris of 14 June 1921] by Harald Meyer","authors":"Ivan Jakubec","doi":"10.1177/00225266221087943","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00225266221087943","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":501587,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Transport History","volume":"2 1","pages":"002252662210879"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138544568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}