For my Masters project, I took a deep dive into the history of the Jersey Railways and Tramways Ltd., a railway company that used to exist on the Island of Jersey. The project uncovered interesting findings, most notably a deep relationship between the railway and bus travel.
The project was supervised by Professor Martyn Frampton and Dr Rhodri Hayward from Queen Mary, University of London. I'm very greatful for their support on the project.
The JR&T was a company that ran a small 7 ½ mile railway on the island of Jersey, connecting St. Helier with St Aubin and the tourist hotspot at Corbiere. After a management buyout, the company becomes a harbinger of railway technology. Electrification of the system is considered, modern lighting is trialled and the now famous Sentinel Camel railcars that saw worldwide adoption were originally designed and built for this humble railway. The project also explored how the railway fought and then embraced fierce competition from new bus companies, as well as how it was an early adopter of the “feeder bus” paradigm.
This project was then adapted into an episode of Gareth Dennis' #RailNatter series. It was great fun to produce and has a load of fun images of the railway I uncovered. If you enjoy it, leave a comment on his video and maybe watch the rest. It's also available in podcast form (sans slides) in any good podcast app (such as Overcast).
If you would like to read the dissertation, please contact me via my historians.social profile. You can send me a private message with your e-mail. I'm happy to supply to any academic or researcher, on the proviso that the work will never be submitted to a corpus/dataset bound for, or used with any AI or GPT tools. You can read more about my opinions on this here.
