Abstract
In the editorship of The Journal of Transport History, we have two reasons to be particularly pleased to present this issue. First, the date of this JTH issue is August, inaugurating the new pattern of the Journal, which now includes three issues each year.
A second element is the diversity of the topics and their methodologies.
The first paper, written by Colin Divall and Hiroki Shin, engages with the history of railway coach design in post-Second World War (WW2) UK, focusing on the competition among different professionals of the British railway industry. The role of railway experts is here mixed with design concepts and a more general shift in the marketing of railways. The iconic value attributed to the restyling of the coach was also a way to cope with railway decline, and here indeed the paper bridges different elements of transport history, from modal shift to industry expertise to marketing and design.
Pieter De Graef works on a different era, that is, the eighteenth century, and on a different geographical setting, that is, the Flemish region. He deals with one of the big historical questions: How much did transport facilities and ameliorations trigger economic development? Working on the fertilizer market developments, his paper suggests that transport improvements in the Flemish region were not the principal cause of the market growth. And this is an important clue which asks for further investigations.
Greg Thompson and Danika Bellamy-Sankar worked on California’s Wildcat Sedans in the USA’s inter-bellum period. The Wildcat Sedans were intercity shared taxi services which flourished despite the bus and rail monopoly and which disappeared only with the fuel rationing of WW2. Leveraging archival sources, this paper offers a hidden history of automobility in the USA, well beyond the better know example of the urban-only jitney service.
The Brazilian railway industrial heritage is the core of Juan Cano Sanchiz’s paper, which focuses on the history of the FEPASA Complex in the city of Jundiaí. Jundiaí’s railway workshop buildings – today abandoned and left as relics – are analysed under an archaeological lens, offering interesting outcomes which range from transport to labour to energy history.
The last paper of the issue is written by Milan Stankovic, who presents the history of the Yugoslavian Automotive Factory ‘Crvena zastava’. Stankovic’s research confirms the outcomes of previous investigations on the East Europe car industry: those countries (and Yugoslavia with greater efforts) tried to achieve motor-vehicle mass production as an industrialisation trigger, as an export market, and eventually to offer mass motorisation also to the domestic market.
It is interesting to note how different the methodologies used are. The diversity of approaches, angles and sources on which the research studies here presented are based is striking and should encourage us to reflect on our investigation tools. Just to mention some of those sources, we have company archives and in-house magazines, interviews with privileged witnesses, but also newspapers; we have a cliometric approach, and a large use of maps and geography-based understandings. Design history naturally carries a visual dimension in the analysis, looking at archives and the drawings there kept, but also at the artefacts produced and still existing today. And then, we can read of industrial heritage scrutiny, gauged under the lens of archaeology-like investigation tools.
This brief summary of procedures used in this issue further enhances the explorations made by JTH contributors (and by historians at large) confirming the multiple methods of analysis. But this is also a signal of the health of the transport history, which is coping with a large variety of tools, and it is looking with attention at the evolutions developed in historiographical analysis. As scholars interested in transport and mobility history, we should keep looking at those developments with great curiosity and, naturally, with critical eyes. Many of those trends can be hugely beneficial in identifying new research avenues also in transport research. Global history as much as urban history and the renewed attention to exchanges and mobilities is a first example. But the new wave of investigation on Neolithic human movements is striking in its outcomes, which put the stereotypical understating of mobility, transport and movements under pressure (and sometimes put an end to it).
The Journal of Transport History fully supports innovative approaches, which can indeed unlock the full potentialities of the field.