A City's Transportation History

One of the things I love about London is that despite having history on display at pretty much every street corner, it does a great job at telling the story of their city.

There is the Museum of London, which looks and the good and bad from the city's past. The London War Museum covers wartime on the home front. The most fascinating place for me, though, is the London Transport Museum.

Located at Covent Garden the museum has recently undergone a renovation and expansion.

It is difficult to separate London's transport history from its urban history - a fact well presented at the museum. It has what you would expect: early buses, trolleys, and tube cars from both the horse-drawn and motorized eras and detailed displays about the people and engineering that made them work.

There is also an extensive section on the 'art of transportation', urban images and, in an exhibit called Suburbia, the growth of the city as new transport technologies were implemented.

Sadly, we have no such museum in Manitoba. Even the archives that hold pretty much the entirety of Winnipeg's historic treasures are in a sea of cardboard boxes stored in a leaky, damp building just one mechanical failure or tarp slip away from being destroyed.

Preserving the city's paper and some of it's built history may be a bit of a lost cause due to lack of interest but there is a group ready to go at it from the transportation angle.

The Manitoba Transit Heritage Association, around since 1989, now has nine restored buses dating from the 1930's to the 1980's and is working with Heritage Winnipeg to restore the circa 1909 streetcar 356.

The group is beginning the hunt for space to show the vehicles, as well as the other transit and urban heritage items that they have collected.

Hopefully, in a few months, the bud of an urban history related museum will show up on the scene.

For more images:

Inside London Transport Museum Flickr Page
Manitoba Transit Heritage Flickr Page