Tourism and the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility, T2 M, York, 6-9 October 2005

Abstract

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.