It is one of the hottest days in Germany. I try to work and in order to cool down I think of my eldest son, who is exchange student in Hyderabad/India at the moment, where it is much hotter than here. A second thougt goes forward to our next Annual Conference in New Delhi in December 2-5. Average temperatures in Delhi in December are between 10 and 20 degrees, with 7 hours daily sunshine.

The local organizing committee in India has done a great job in the last weeks and came up with an impressive conference webpage (http://www.t2m2010.com/), linked to our general website. Program committee has made up its decision and finally appointed 64 papers and organized them in exactly 20 sessions. We never had such a broad number of papers from Asian colleagues and never so interesting sessions on the relation of transport and development. So, I am very much looking forward to a cool and sunny conference site at the National Rail Museum in Delhi.

On June 16th, for the first time in the history of the EC of T2M, we organized our mid term meeting as an (intercontinental) telefone conference. It worked very well. First of all, we all were proud to “save” so much CO2. CO2-footprint calculator of ICAO (http://www2.icao.int/en/carbonoffset/Pages/default.aspx) allows you to estimate the emissions attributed to your air travel. If I count ten participants of our EC and an average distance of only 3.000k km, the calculator throws out impressive  5.100 Kg of CO2. Besides, we had a disciplined, efficient and decision orientated meeting. Everybody obviously tried to be short and precise. It was a good experience, which we will continue. However, I am looking forward to see you all physically in Delhi in December.

From June 17-20, the Tensions  of Europe Network organized a final conference in Sofia. It is the by far largest research network in the field of history of technology, and transport history was an important topic. The network decided to keep on with biannual conferences, the next probably on infrastructures and democracy in Paris.

Our friends for the COSMOBILITIES network ((cultural) sociology of mobility) have remarkably overcome the end of German funding of the network secretariat and plan their next meeting for October, 27th to the 29th at Aalborg University (Infos: mailinglist@cosmobilities.net)

I wish you all a wonderful summer (on the Northern Hemisphere) and a relaxing winter (in the South). Try to work some days on you papers for Delhi,

yours Hans Dienel