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Transportation Libraries

As transportation achievement goes on from strength to strength, from speed to speed and from medium to medium, the story of its history grows entrancingly. That history can only be adequately preserved in Libraries.

Fortunately, in addition to the official resources for dealing with matters of this kind, there are enthusiastic collectors of information about transport in various parts of the world who vie in keenness with the collectors of stamps or old china in their avidity for specimens to add to their collections. Their quest is, however, a much more admirable one than that of the man with the mania for stamps of assorted countries and periods, for out of the study of transport, its problems and efforts of the past, may come hints to help those of the present day in perfecting the transport of the future—ideas started, worked on, and dropped perhaps because of some mechanical difficulty of the times that modern engineering practice has overcome.

Hardly anything could feed the imaginative mind more pleasingly than the richly varied story that makes the romance of transport development and invention; for with it is bound up the greatest chapters in economic history, the most spectacular and useful of engineering works, and the most daring deeds of the pioneers and explorers. Marco Polo's strange journeys and stranger vehicles for travel to the land of Cathay, the boats of the Vikings and the Phoenicians, the flying ship of the Wright brothers, and Stephenson's Rocket, all made history in their day and generation and are fit subjects for the shelves and corridors of the libraries of transportation. The rickshaw, the dog car, the elephant and the pony train, the eastern caravan and the western express, all take their place with the choicest transport titbits of fiction—the coaching incidents that gem the romance and humour of Dickens, the ships of Conrad, the dreams of De Vinci.

Timetables and graphs; models and orders; diagrams, drawings and photographs; historical documents; specifications and volumes—these are the physical emblems that go to the making of transportation libraries. But the spirit of interest, the lively enthusiasm, that mark the work of private collectors the world over, are among the sources of inspiration that make for the greatness of such libraries.

In America the Hopkins Transportation Library, associated with Stanford University, California, is a notable example of the work of a private collector, Timothy Hopkins, who, in 1892, presented to that University his private collection of railway literature which he had assembled while treasurer of the Central Pacific Railroad Company and the Southern Pacific Company.

Many New Zealand railwaymen have built up quite substantial private libraries upon railways, but the most impressive in the Dominion is undoubtedly that of Mr. W. W. Stewart, of Auckland, whose remarkable museum of railway specimens and library of railway references, books, paintings and photographs, form an outstanding example of what can be done, by the enthusiasm, skill, research and good judgment of a non-railwayman, to make the history of the railway development of a country live again for the interest and delight of all who are privileged to view the collection.

The knowledge that numbers of private individuals are keenly interested in the details of railway operations must be to the men of the service what their fan mail is to film stars, both a challenge and an inspiration in the performance of their work.