Mobility, museums and awkward unsettling

Abstract

From 1972 British Rail's "Advanced Passenger Train Experimental" (APT-E) tested a combination of innovations that promised a tantalising and proficient mobility on the UK's Victorian-era railway network. The project's failure and eventual cancellation in 1985 has made the preservation and display of APT-E awkward. APT-E's revolutionary mobility sits awkwardly with its present (immobile) material state as a museum artefact, as does the context of derision and disappointment surrounding its cancellation. By experiencing APT-E in situ and interviewing the conservation team, this paper forms an initial exploration of the ideas and tactics used by those who preserve and display awkward and rejected mobilities in a way that rehabilitates their potential and their temporal indeterminacy.duration, mobility, museum, railway, temporality | AWKWARD INTRODUCTIONSWriting about the present-day lives of objects from the past generally requires some retelling. Geoghegan and Hess (2015) retell the former life of an early BBC radio transmitter ("2LO") in small and elegant morsels which they intersperse among wider discussions of the affective and emotional fields that coalesce around it as a conserved object in the present. My less elegant approach is to use a discrete block of text (below) to introduce the Advanced Passenger Train Experimental (henceforth APT-E). APT-E was an early and troubled attempt to produce a high-speed train for the UK, which, like 2LO, is now preserved and has attracted its own field of affective and emotional relationships.Retelling APT-E's story is awkward because, unlike 2LO, the act of retelling may help to further settle APT-E into a longstanding narrative of being "troubled" or "failed." It is awkward because I wish to explore how the APT-E Conservation and Support Group (who manage both its conservation and displayhenceforth "volunteers") work to unsettle the train from existing understandings and reposition APT-E on a far more indeterminate, potential-filled and open-ended trajectory.

Materialities and historical geographies: An introduction

“…As such, she suggests the possibilities that object‐orientated research could have for further complicating established geographical conceptions of global fashion cities. Finally, focusing on the display of British Rail's 1972 “Advanced Passenger Train Experimental” (APT‐E) in the National Railway Museum, Paul Wright () reflects on the tensions present when statically displaying objects designed to be mobile. Therefore, Wright explicitly engages with a theme implied throughout this special section, foregrounding the museum and archival context of many of the material sources discussed by various contributors.…”