Alexandre Ramos, CIDEHUS-UÉ (Portugal)
The Last Passenger: Portuguese Colonial Railways and Cinema.

The “colonial issue” was not unique to Portugal; its European counterparts faced similar challenges amid growing international criticism of colonial sovereignty. However, for the democratic powers, managing the colonial issue was more complex because, among other things, they were subject to greater scrutiny by the press and public opinion. The development of colonial railways and cinema emerged in the postwar period as a powerful tool for (counter)information. Portugal was no exception. In fact, the Portuguese authorities’ use of cinema for colonial propaganda—in which railroads were often the “theme”—is the subject of this article. With the following essay, we aim to show how Portuguese colonial cinema is an important source of information for studying African railroads.

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Hugo Silveira Pereira, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal)
Photography and Railways in the Portuguese Colonies: “Progress,” “Civilization,” and the Technological Landscape (1880s–1910s).

Beginning in the 1870s, Portugal extended to its African and Asian colonies the Saint-Simonian development program it had been implementing on the mainland since the 1850s (historically known as Fontismo). By the eve of World War I, approximately 2,000 km of track had been laid in Angola and Mozambique (Navarro 2018). The various actors involved in this effort left behind a vast array of documentation (reports, debates, statistics), including photographs of the construction and operation of railways. Photography was a common and relatively widespread activity in Portugal since 1870 and was closely associated with Fontismo (Baptista 2014). As a product of science and technology itself, photography was attributed a supposed objectivity that paintings and drawings lacked. However, quite the contrary: photographs are highly subjective—objects staged to convey a specific message and to contribute to the construction of broader myths (Barthes 1972). They are embedded in the culture and ideology in which they were produced, and they are linked to discursive forms that depend on the institutions and agents who took them (Daniels; Cosgrove 1988; Vicente 2015). In this paper, I analyze how photography was used to publicize that Portugal was doing its part in the European mission to civilize Africa, thereby proving that it was a modern, technologically advanced, and imperial nation. Additionally, I argue that both railroads and photography contributed to the definition of a technological landscape in Angola and Mozambique. To do so, I draw on a diverse set of images from various Portuguese and British sources taken in the context of railway construction and operation in Angola and Mozambique. I combine these with written documents from the same period, which are essential for fully understanding the messages conveyed by the photographs (Daniels; Cosgrove 1988; Vicente 2015).

Dirk Forschner, Technische Universität Berlin (Germany)
The contribution of advances in traction to Portuguese railways by the German locomotive industry, 1855–1931: selected cases.

Between 1855 and 1931, Germany repeatedly supplied rolling stock to Portuguese railways. This successful economic and technological cooperation began when Egestorff in Hannover/Linden exported its first steam locomotive to Portugal in 1855 and concluded with the delivery of a high-power engine by Henschel in 1931 for the Beira Alta line. Among the German manufacturers were not only companies such as Henschel and Hanomag, but also others such as Schwartzkopff, Borsig, Esslingen, and Maffei in Munich.
In this presentation, the author aims to provide a brief overview of German locomotive production for Portugal and will use four orders as case studies to analyze the technology imported to Portugal during those years.

Key questions guiding the analysis of technology transfer in the presentation include: What did the Portuguese customer demand, and how did the German manufacturer meet those demands? Was there a trend toward standardization of steam traction in Portugal? Did the German manufacturer attempt to create a Portuguese locomotive design, or were the locomotives ultimately operated in Portugal those designed by Maffei or Henschel? Was there a specific preference for operational tasks—such as freight or express train locomotives—that led the Portuguese customer to order locomotives from Germany?

Egestorff, later known as HANOMAG (Hannoversche Maschinenbau Aktien Gesellschaft), began its business in Portugal with a 2-4-0 locomotive with a tender. Henschel then concluded its involvement in 1931 with a high-power 4-8-0 four-cylinder compound express train locomotive. What did the German industry manufacture in the interim?

The author will attempt to analyze, through case studies, the locomotives exported to Portugal in light of the questions mentioned above. An additional focus will be on the duration of service of the German locomotives in Portugal.

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