Modern railways were born in Britain 200 years ago. From there, they spread to the rest of the world, reducing travel and transportation times, and fostering modernisation, industrialisation and urbanisation. Facing both continuity and continuous change (including the expansion and contraction of networks, new traction technologies, and instances of nationalisation and privatisation), in the 21st century, the railway is the most efficient and sustainable mode of transport and, particularly in the East and Global South, is expanding its tracks into the future. To honour its 200th anniversary, the 9th East-West Workshop on Industrial Archaeology travels to the railway past to examine the international circulation of treaties, technologies, materials, and people that defined the early development of railways in Eurasia.
The East-West series of workshops aims to exchange ideas and knowledge among Western and Eastern colleagues to build a more international and diverse industrial archaeology. The activity is organised jointly by the Institute for Cultural Heritage and History of Science & Technology (USTB, China), and the UK Association for Industrial Archaeology.
PLACE:
Zoom (online meeting).
Register for FREE to get the Zoom link to the event here:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/9th-east-west-workshop-on-industrial-archaeology-full-steam-ahead-tickets-1751647748569
DATE & TIME:
15 November 2025, Saturday.
10.00-12.00 London time
SPEAKERS & TALKS:
- Yibing FANG (Chinese Academy of Sciences, China): "A Review of Research on China’s Early Steel Rails Heritage"
Since 2012, the author has conducted a systematic study on steel rails collected by the National Railway Museum of China (NRMC), spanning from the late 19th century to the 1930s. This study, in collaboration with NRMC, the University of Science and Technology Beijing and the School of Materials Science at Shanghai University, encompasses rails’ information identification, material performance testing, and historical research, aiming to interpret the cultural value of NRMC’s rail collection and address several historical issues related to the manufacturing of modern steel materials in the Chinese early industrialisation process. This endeavour represents an attempt at archaeological research on China’s steel industry, which also sheds light on several challenges faced by industrial archaeology in China.
- Paulina ROMANOWICZ (Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland): "Rediscovery of a Brickworks Narrow-Gauge Industrial Railway Tunnel in Stołczyn, Poland"
During the construction works of the infrastructure for the Szczecin Metropolitan Railway in 2023, a construction team came across a forgotten railway tunnel running between a clay pit and Alfred Brandy’s brickworks, which the Eisenwerk Kraft Ironworks later took over. A change of administration in 1945 and a flexible approach to space management during the Polish People’s Republic period meant that only a few people remembered that this railway passage was located in this place. A careful study of photographs and maps made it possible to interpret the discovery. This talk describes the findings of this railway site and its preliminary investigation from the perspective of industrial archaeology, and introduces new data revealed by the ongoing redevelopment works in the area.
- Arida Fitriana YASMIN (University of Groningen, Netherlands): "Follow the Tracks: Railway Heritage Management at the Ombilin Coal Mining Heritage of Sawahlunto, Indonesia"
The introduction of the railway in West Sumatra is indebted to the founding of coal mining in Sawahlunto in the late nineteenth century. Suddenly, the need for better and more reliable transportation became urgent for the Dutch East Indies Government to support the mining activities. The railway network connecting the Ombilin mines to the port of Padang, which was finished in 1894, supported the creation of Sawahlunto as a booming company town. Railway tracks, stations, iron bridges, and tunnels were built and became part of the historic landscape. In 2019, amidst the closure of the mining company, the Ombilin Coal Mining complex was inscribed as a World Heritage Site, becoming the first industrial site in Indonesia to be part of a World Heritage property. This talk investigates the significance and challenges of managing railway heritage in Sawahlunto, touching on issues such as how to deal with railway heritage and sustainable interventions to preserve the legacy of our past.
- Juan Manuel CANO SANCHIZ (University of Science and Technology Beijing, China / Association for Industrial Archaeology, UK): "European Early Railway Architecture in Beijing: A Perspective from Building Archaeology"
This talk offers a general introduction to and some preliminary results achieved in the project “Research on the Railway Architecture of Beijing during the Late Qing Dynasty from the Perspective of Building Archaeology”, which is supported by the Beijing Natural Science Foundation (grant number IS23118). The talk briefly presents two railway lines with a focus on their past built environment in Beijing: The Imperial Railways of North China (later Peking-Mukden Railway), a Chinese project developed from 1881 onwards with British assistance, and the Peking-Hankow Railway, which was constructed from 1897 onwards by a Franco-Belgian group in cooperation with China. The research concentrates on the physical evidence of these lines, which is traced in the field and also in photographs from the early 20th century. The talk pays attention to building materials, techniques and designs to shed new light on their provenance and impact on the early modernisation of the country.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Dr Yibing FANG, Doctor of Engineering, graduated from the University of Science and Technology Beijing with a specialisation in the History of Science and Technology. Currently, she is a professor of history of science and technology and a doctoral supervisor at the Institute of History of Natural Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences. She is Secretary-General of the Industrial Archaeology and Industrial Heritage Research Group of the Chinese Society for the History of Science and Technology, and she was Vice-Chair of the Permanent Committee on the History of Mechanisms and Machines Science of the International Federation for the Theory of Mechanisms and Machines (IFToMM) from 2018 to 2024. Her primary research interests encompass the history of modern and contemporary technology, industrial archaeology, and industrial heritage. She has authored, co-authored and edited numerous publications in these subjects, among them, Cases of Chinese Industrial Heritage from the Perspective of the History of Technology (in Chinese).
Dr Paulina ROMANOWICZ graduated in history at the University of Szczecin in 2009, and in archaeology at the University of Łódź in 2010. In 2014, she successfully defended a doctoral thesis entitled “Ludic Culture in the Towns of the Southern Baltic Coast in the Late Middle Ages. An Archaeological Study” (in Polish). Since 2011, she has worked at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, at the Centre for the Medieval Archaeology of the Baltic Region in Szczecin. Her research interests centre on the medieval and early modern period in the Baltic area, the archaeology of childhood, the archaeology of modernity, and the history of games and play. She manages the PRELUDIUM grant awarded by the National Science Centre.
Ar Arida Fitriana YASMIN holds a degree in architecture from the University of Brawijaya (2017, Indonesia), and an MA in the history of architecture and town planning by the University of Groningen (2020, Netherlands), where she is now a PhD Candidate in the field of history of architecture and urbanism. Yasmin is currently conducting research on the impact of railway development on architecture and town planning in the Dutch East Indies, present-day Indonesia, and the further implications of this complex relationship in the past, particularly in relation to current practice in heritage conservation. Her previous research experiences include visual identity in the historical architecture of Indonesia and adaptive reuse of industrial heritage. She has also contributed to the Atlas of Historic Infrastructure and Mobile Heritage of the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, among other works.
Dr Juan Manuel CANO SANCHIZ is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Cultural Heritage and History of Science & Technology (University of Science and Technology Beijing, China), where he teaches industrial archaeology, critical industrial heritage studies, and industrial museology. He holds a BA in Art History, an MA in Archaeology and Heritage and a PhD in Archaeology (University of Córdoba, Spain). From 2013 to 2016, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the São Paulo State University (UNESP) in Brazil, and has also completed research stays in Spain, England and Germany. He is interested in the archaeology of modern and contemporary times, although his work focuses on the archaeology of industrialisation. His current research direction is the archaeology of early international railway architecture in China.
