Brazilian railway heritage in search of an audience

Journal of Transport History, The, Sep 2002 by cooper, Martin

Museum review

Brazilian railway heritage in search of an audience

Museu da Companhia Paulista, Avenida Uniao dos Ferroviarios 1760, Jundiai, Sao Paulo, Brazil. Phone 55 11 4586 2093; website www.museudacompanhiapaulista.com.br

Like many railway museums in Brazil, the Museu da Companhia Paulista in Jundiai is hidden from the public gaze. The visitor has to undertake a degree of detective work to discover the address, opening hours and directions to the museum, especially when local taxi drivers appear uncertain about where the museum actually is. In this case the effort is well worth it to find an example of a transport museum that is full of creative ideas about community involvement and the development of its display practices. The challenge is for the museum's managers to secure adequate funding for these projects and to find ways of connecting with a wider audience.

Jundiai is a satellite town of 322,000 inhabitants, 60 km to the north-west of Sao Paulo, lying in a broad valley surrounded by large coffee plantations and food-processing factories. The Companhia Paulista de Estradas de Ferro was in 1872 the first railway company in Brazil not to rely on British entrepreneurial capital and as such played this nationalistic card to create bonds of loyalty amongst its work force and shareholders.1 Its network stretched into the west and north of Sao Paulo state, transporting coffee from the plantations to the coastal port of Santos. In 1922 it became the first Latin American network to run electric traction and was for much of its life one of the main passenger transport providers for people living in the interior of Sao Paulo state. The company was privatised in 1998 and what remains of the network now forms part of the Ferroban SA freight network.

A museum was first opened on this site, the former administrative headquarters of the Companhia Paulista, in 1979. It was recurated and reopened in 1995 with initial funding from the railway company and the Sao Paulo State Governor's office. The museum is managed by a charity, the Association for the Preservation of the Memory of the Companhia Paulista, which consists of a small full-time salaried team. `We're four madmen who want to preserve the company's name,' remarks Carlos Tonielo, a former Companhia Paulista administrator with thirty years' service, who since 1993 has been in charge of the library and museum.2 The rest of the team consists of two retired railway technicians and a marketing officer. The Association employs one person who is responsible for opening the museum each day, collecting admission fees, and interpreting the exhibitions for visitors and school groups. None has any previous museum experience and can be congratulated for creating arguably one of the best presented railway museums in Brazil.

The visitor approaches the museum by car along an urban dual carriageway from the existing passenger railway station 4 km away. Glimpses of freight yards raise the expectation of a rail centre of some kind. The approach on foot, down the hill from the bus station in the centre of Jundiai, gives a better view of the magisterial museum building: the tall pale red brick facade in the grounds of the former workshops silhouetted above the traditional low whitewashed buildings of the rest of the cityscape. The whole rail site covers several acres, and lack of signposting within brings confusion to the visitor as to what is a museum building and what is part of the local authority secretariat, which uses some of the former railway buildings as offices and departmental space.

A bronze plaque outside the exhibition hall declares that the museum is `in homage to the company which contributed so much to the development of the state [of Sao Paulo] between 1872 and 1971'. It is a mission statement that has not yet been fully realised. The exhibition space is divided into four large rooms, each simply furbished with open wooden beams, clean whitewashed walls and polished wooden floors. The museum interior is rich in small objects ranging from tickets, uniforms and lamps to directors' furniture and scale steam locomotive models produced by workshop apprentices.

Themes of the public's historical interaction with the railway are picked out through displays of furniture in the contexts of `waiting room', `ticket office', 'station manager's office' and, on the upper floor, `the director's office'. This first step towards the contextualisation of smaller objects is to be welcomed. Jundiai is one of the few railway museums in Brazil which has thought about ways of displaying and how to make the connections between artefact, life, memory and history. But this approach to display does not extend to the entire museum space. The back room on the ground floor is a rich mix of further smaller artefacts, from washstands to wooden models of points, from coal shovels to locomotive nameplates and clocks. For an enthusiast with a detailed knowledge of railway technology it can give a feeling of involvement and discovery, almost like being in a junk shop. For the general public it is unlikely that a line of four different signal lamps without labels will be appreciated. Instead it was observed that visitors would handle the reversible wooden second-class carriage seat (despite the `no touching' notice) and declare that they recalled travelling in a coach with such seats when they were young. There is clearly scope for using such artefacts to increase visitor connectivity, for example by telling stories of the geographical growth of towns in the interior of Sao Paulo state as the railway spread its tentacles across the landscape.