Dear Les, The people story in railraod and industrial museums is inevitably interwoven with another thread on this list concerning first person interpreters. A very good example, and well received, in the UK is the newly refurbished and reopened London Transport Museum in Covent Garden, London. Some ingenious engineering meant that they could display their hardware with sufficient space around it to provide much more of a people story with actors giving living interpretations of specific parts of it (e.g. representing construction worker, conductor etc.). I have not been lately and so do not know how well this is holding up. I am still not entirely sure about their particular style of interpretation but it is a distinct advance on the ghastly animatronic figures with taped voices that were all the rage a few years ago. (The worst was the figure of William III in the anniversary exhibition for the bloodless coup of 1688 which gave him the English throne). The National Railway Museum in York has also tried to improve the human and interpretative side of its rpesentation but it does have a problem with the size and variety of its large exhibits and the demand to see them. The three major outdoor industrial museums in Britain, Ironbridge, Beamish and the Black Country museum at Dudley, with reconstructed buildings and processes all offer a very good impression of what life was like in the communities and in the workshops. Some of the presentations are startlingly good; although Ironbridge sets out to depict life in the first quarter of this century, some of their reconstructions (pharmacy, village school, sawmill) are just a little too much like the scenes of my childhood for comfort, and I am still on the low side of 50. So in general answer to your question there are certainly museums in the UK setting out to achieve what you want to see and by and large succeeding. For a view in the US which helpfully refers to many preserved industrial sites try, if you have not seen it already, Bob Gordon's and Pat Malone's new book "The Texture of Industry: an archaeological view of the industrialization of North America". As a final, small-scale example, the fire-brigade museum in Mulhouse France is frist class. Yours sincerely, Peter Northover, Department of Materials, University of Oxford, [log in to unmask]