ABSTRACT
When in 1970 Jack Simmons published his pioneering study Transport Museums in Britain and Western Europe, the dedicated transport museum was already well over 70 years old – the first, a modest railway museum at Hamar, Norway, opened in 1897. But, as Simmons noted, the most spectacular growth came after the Second World War, and not only in those parts of the world he had visited.1 Reliable figures are hard to come by, but even a few national statistics give some idea of the size and geographical extent of the sector today, and its rate of growth over the last three decades. Thus Britain, which in the late 1960s already had over 80 museums falling under the categories of ‘Transport’ and ‘Shipping’, now has well in excess of three times that number. There are nearly 250 sites dedicated to maritime heritage in the United States, and over 200 railroad museums. Australia has 26 railway museums; there are at least four in Latin America, and five in each of the continents of Africa and Asia. When one includes heritage transport – the operation of archaic vehicles for public display or carriage – the number of museums, broadly conceived, becomes much larger. The number of heritage railroads in the United States, for example, all of which have opened in their present form since 1945, adds more than half again to that of conventional railroad museums.2
