The “History of Transport” working group is a special interest group within the German Association for Business History, which provides organisational and financial support. Once a year, the working group meets for a workshop on Transport History. The group is organized by Hans-Liudger Dienel (Berlin) and Hans-Ulrich Schiedt (Berne, Zurich). This year the workshop was hosted by the DB Transport Museum in Nuremberg. The group (around 25 participants) discussed standardisation processes in their decisive importance for the development of transport infrastructures in the last 200 years.

14 papers of the history of standardisation in transport were presented, including Gerold Ambrosius (University of Siegen) on ‘Typologies of standardisation’; Uwe Müller (Europa-Universität Viadrina) on ‘Standardisation of road building and road building machines since the 18th Century’; Erich Weber (Solothurn) on ‘Standardisation of inland water navigation on the River Rhine between the 17th and 19th Century’; Cornelius Neutsch (Universität Siegen) on ‘Standardisation of the post system’; Michael Hascher (München) on ‘Standardisation of electrification processes’; Alexander Klose (Universität Weimar) on ‘Containerisation’; Gisela Hürlimann (Universität Zürich) on ‘Technical standardisation of European Railroads’; Christian Henrich-Franke (Universität Siegen) on ‘History of Eurofima’; Jan-Henrik Peters (Berlin) on ‘Rationalisation process in the German Bahn during the interwar period’; Christopher Kopper (Universität Bielefeld) on ‘Automatisation and rationalisation of German Railroads’; Jörg Potthast (Berlin) on ‘Standardisation and networks effects at German Airports’; Stefan Albrecht (Universität Mainz) on ‘Pooling agreements of commercial airlines with special emphasis to the ČeskoSlovenské Aerolinie’; Guido Thiemeyer (Universität Siegen) on ‘Arbeitsgemeinschaft für die Rheinschifffahrt’; and Ulrich Schiedt (Universität Bern, Via Storia) provided a summing up. At the end, Hans-Ulrich Schiedt thanked the representatives of the German Bahn (Dr. Susanne Kill, Reiner Mertens) for their support of the fruitful meeting.

More information can be found at: www.unternehmensgeschichte.de (Arbeitskreis Verkehrsgeschichte).