Brazilian railway heritage in search of an audience

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

The academic visitor is left with an impression of a museum-in-progress: a site which can rightly be proud of its architectural beauty and its rich collection of smaller objects but which needs to concentrate its curatorial skills on telling stories within the exhibition spaces that can attract and connect with the expectations of the visitors. The further question is whether funding can be found that allows the acquisition of a fuller range of locomotives, and which can provide for their maintenance and preservation in adequate climatic conditions, in order to reflect the iconography of the large artefacts and their part in the history of the railway company. Interestingly, another group of enthusiasts uses a neighbouring locomotive workshop on the site as a closed storehouse for its private collection known as the Antique Car Club of Jundiai. The environmental and political conflicts between the development of road and rail in twentieth-century Brazil could provide a rich source of interpretive inspiration for a joint museum of transport on this site in the future. It would be refreshing to visit a museum in Brazil which attempted to display contested histories.

Notes

1 E. von L. Massarani, R. Delellis and O. Maretti (eds), A era do trem: imagens da saga da ferrovia na formacao do estado de Sdo Paulo (Sao Paulo, Editores LF&N, 1999), pp. 20-33. Other historical data from the Museu da Companhia Paulista visitor leaflet (2001).

2 This museum review is based on fieldwork data and interviews collected at eighteen railway museums and steam heritage sites in Brazil. The full results of the survey appear in a forthcoming master's thesis by the author, `Railway Heritage and Preservation in Brazil', Institute of Railway Studies, York.

3 For a discussion of nation building through State management and the place of museums in Brazilian culture see D. Williams, Culture Wars in Brazil: the first Vargas regime, 1930-45 (Durham NC and London, Duke University Press, 2001).

Martin Cooper

Institute of Railway Studies, York