Railways. A case in the history of industrial heritage II
My Session Status
Transportation and distribution have served as the secondary component to significant industrial expansion after energy and power transformed modes of production. Expanding production permitted increases in output demanding a means to both bring new materials into industrialized regions and export products to markets. Canals and shipping provided the earliest forms of bulk transportation but were limited by capacity, geography, and environmental factors. The combination of power and railways introduced a sizable and significant means to increase transportation and production, and reach otherwise inaccessible landscapes, and thereby affect a vast number of peoples lives in myriad ways. From the mid 19th century through today, rail and motive technology grew increasingly complex, overcoming vast distances and complex terrains. While energy, power, and production are all hallmarks of industrialization, it is the introduction of railways that facilitated explosive growth in some cases and initial growth in others. These papers explore ways of documenting, conserving, and understanding significant rail networks often in the face of poor national support with an emphasis on early Chinese, Indian, Balkan, Brazilian, and forest railways.
Sub Sessions
The first industrial heritage site in Asia to be recognised as a World Heritage Site (WHS), the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (DHR), (now part of the serial nomination of Mountain Railways of India), finds itself at the intersection of the past and the future. The OUV of the site describes it as an engineering marvel, the DHR is not just the narrow-gauge railway but also the experience of the journey through the myriad landscapes it traverses over its 88 km length. Since its construction in ...
This paper builds on a sequence of earlier work on the industrialization of world wood production. The 2014 ICOMOS and 2015 TICCIH papers presented a scientific heritage evaluation method and applied it to examples in the forest industry. The 2018 TICCIH paper illustrated the contextual role of a comprehensive framework for the industry called Global Wood. Forest railways are a significant heritage element within this framework, and their heritage potential as a ...
The presentation shows some questions related to ongoing research carried out in the PhD in Education, under the supervision of prof. dr. Marcos Villela Pereira, at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Brazil, and who intends to discuss museological and educational processes related to the railway industrial heritage. The topic selected for the exhibition at this Congress presents the educational proposal at Vila dos Ferroviários in Porto Alegre that uses as method...
