Volume I – No. 3 – September 2004
Within less than two months we will meet again at out Second International T2M Conference in Dearborn, organized by Bruce Pietrykowski and his team. We have a similar number of participants to last year, but we would like to have more attendees, so, if you have not yet decided to go, please give it an extra thought and register at t2m.org And for those of you who have already registered: don’t forget to send in your full-text paper before Monday 20 September at the very latest! On that date we will manufacture the CD to be sent to all attendees well before the conference. Since its spring meeting in Paris the provisional Executive Committee (EC) has been working hard to fulfil all the wishes members expressed during the Eindhoven meeting, especially the ‘Motion’, which was accepted near unanimously. Especially, the EC managed:

•to reduce the student fee to _ 25, because of the Editorial Board of The Journal of Transport History’s lowering of the student subscription rate; I wish to express my sincere gratitude to the Board and its chair, Peter Lyth, for this important gesture;

•to start with a modest Conference Travel Fund for PhD students: a Travel Fund Committee chaired by EC member Larry Shumsky has been installed, and will notify the beneficiaries as soon as possible; for this year’s conference the Travel Fund has been financed by institutional membership fees from the European Center for Mobility Documentation in Eindhoven, the Automotive Heritage Centre at Dearborn, and the Railway Museum in York. Our main sponsor, ACEA in Brussels, also contributed to this fund. For the coming years the EC strives to find other sponsors, as we need the membership money for our regular activities. Any suggestions from the members as to potential sponsors are very welcome, indeed!

•to prepare the Members Meeting in Dearborn (for the exact date, see the Conference Programme).

The preparation of our next Members Meeting involved the drafting of our Statutes, and the organization of the ballot of T2M officers. I wish to thank the members of the Statutes Committee, especially Paul van Heesvelde and Clay McShane, for the hard labour they spent on formulating these Statutes.

At the moment you receive this Newsletter, we will start our listserv for a discussion among our
members about the Statutes, as we intend to have these statutes accepted through the listserv well
before the Members Meeting. We can then limit the time spent on the Statutes during the
meeting to the formal voting. A separate message to all members will be sent to announce the
opening of the listserv. For the same reason, we will organize the T2M officers’ ballot through the
listserv. Most of the provisional EC members have expressed the willingness to become a part of
the first official Executive Committee. Their CVs will be included in our listserv, but before we
start voting I would like to encourage other T2M members who might wish to become a member
of the EC. As an association, we emphasize the importance of young scholars within our
organisation, and I call upon PhD candidates among us to step forward and help lead T2M.
If you are interested, please send me a short CV and some lines about how you would like
T2M to evolve in the future. The deadline for these submissions is Monday, 4 October.
Voting will then be open until the end of the month.

Gijs Mom