What Happens if We Think About Railways as a Kind of Consumption? Towards a New Historiography of Transport and Citizenship in Early-Twentieth-Century Britain

Historians have been rather unconcerned about how the provision and use of transport, both personal and collective, might have influenced consumption in these and related areas up to 1939. In particular, remarkably little attention has been given to the idea that transport has a place alongside other kinds of ‘necessaries’, such as food, in defining the basic rights that define citizenship in any particular period. most attention has been given to the consumption of personal forms of transport in Britain before the second world war, such as the car, motorcycle and bicycle. This paper looks a little more widely at what it might mean to take Britain’s railways as a kind of consumption in the early-twentieth century, a period in which they for the first time faced serious competition for passenger traffic (first, in the urban context, from the electric tram and then, increasingly in all spheres, from the motor bus, coach and car).