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Visions of public and private mobility: the Kowloon railway terminus in Hong Kong

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2023

Adonis M.Y. Li Open the ORCID record for Adonis M.Y. Li [Opens in a new window]
Adonis M.Y. Li*
Affiliation:
Department of History, 10/F Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong
*
*Corresponding author. Email: adonisli@connect.hku.hk
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Abstract

This article explores and complicates notions of public and private urban mobility through the exploration of one site of transport, the Kowloon railway terminus in Hung Hom, Hong Kong. It considers the question: how did the conflicts and tensions between public and private forms of mobility affect policies for the urban environment in colonial Hong Kong? This article explores the Hung Hom railway terminus and its tensions and interactions with automobility and other forms of transport, most pertinently the bus network. Hong Kong's imperial and colonial context further throws into question seemingly straightforward divisions of public and private mobility.

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Urban History , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , February 2025 , pp. 141 - 158
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Introduction

On 24 November 1975, a new railway terminus opened in the British colony of Hong Kong. The Hung Hom terminus, the southern endpoint of the Kowloon–Canton Railway (KCR), was described by the acting governor as ‘a handsome addition to our skyline’.Footnote 1 The new station, with its drab grey exterior and a cubical multi-storey car park above it, was criticized on practical and aesthetic grounds almost immediately. A journalist derided it as ‘that inefficient monstrosity of a terminus’.Footnote 2 One newspaper reader described it as a ‘singularly unattractive morgue’.Footnote 3 Two historians later considered it ‘enslaved to the motor car, surrounded by great road ramps, and dominated by an unpleasant multi-storey car-park. Now it repels rather than beckons, and Hong Kong has destroyed another of the fine colonial buildings of the territory.’Footnote 4

This article considers the question: how did the conflicts and tensions between public and private forms of mobility affect policies for the urban environment in colonial Hong Kong? To answer this question, one specific site will be explored in close detail: the KCR Kowloon terminus in Hung Hom and its interchange with other forms of transport. In doing so, this article complicates and problematizes notions of public and private mobility. Hong Kong's imperial and colonial context further complicates seemingly straightforward divisions of public and private mobility.

Mobility by automobile, or automobility, is ‘the dominant culture’ that defines what ‘the good life’ is, and a requisite for ‘an appropriate citizenship of mobility’; the ‘auto’ also denotes the car as a private vehicle to the exclusion of all others.Footnote 5 It is thus a private form of transport. Public transport, on the other hand, is normally understood as forms of transport designed and used by groups of people, generally operated by and for public benefit and at a fixed schedule. As this article will demonstrate, this rigid dichotomy breaks down somewhat in the Hong Kong context, and the site of the Hung Hom railway terminus provides an opportunity to delve into this tension.

This article contributes to a growing literature on colonial mobilities and modern experiences. For some scholars, colonial mobility and racial politics went hand-in-hand. Tilman Frasch's comparative study on trams in colonial Rangoon and Singapore found that urban public transport modes were contingent on complex political and racial contestations between different societal groups, and between competing forms of mobility.Footnote 6 Michael Pante has shown that urban motorized mobility was entangled with ideas of white racial superiority in Manila and Singapore.Footnote 7 Liora Bigon has found that the Lagos steam tramway consolidated racial segregation, which paralleled the effect of the Peak Tram in Hong Kong.Footnote 8

For other scholars, imposing order onto perceived urban chaos was the key for colonial governments. In Ann Stoler's words, ‘a “colony” as a political concept is not a place but a principle of managed mobilities, mobilizing and immobilizing populations according to a set of changing rules and hierarchies that orders social kinds’.Footnote 9 David Arnold has explored how traffic in India was portrayed as a need for colonial order to be imposed, but also how the discourse on traffic itself became a site of contestation between colonial actors.Footnote 10 Similarly, Raghav Kishore has explored how different ‘scales’ of the colonial government in Delhi had their own visions of imposing ‘order’ onto what they saw was a chaotic city and spatial configuration.Footnote 11 Kate McDonald has warned historians against uncritically adopting the points of reference used by historical actors in our analyses; within mobility histories, this is made more crucial as movement was taken as a marker of modernity by imperialists, often with violent consequences, as her case-study of Japanese imperialism shows.Footnote 12

Hong Kong was a node in global imperial mobility networks. Its place in the fictional Around the World in Eighty Days illustrates how the colony was caught up in ‘the world's mobilities…being remade by Anglo-imperial hegemony’.Footnote 13 Indeed, migration and movement between Hong Kong and other places has been the focus of many studies.Footnote 14 However, there is a dearth of academic histories on mobility within Hong Kong itself. This case-study of the Hung Hom terminus redresses this paucity.

This article also contributes to an emerging literature on the history of roads and automobility. Automobility's triumph over public transport in the US and Europe has been well-covered elsewhere.Footnote 15 Automobility's proliferation could be totalizing, though Simon Gunn has shown how the imposition of the ‘car system’ in Britain was a more gradual process.Footnote 16 For example, in Birmingham, automobility was imposed onto an urban fabric that had been first shaped by tramcars and motor buses, whilst in Nagoya, Japan, underground streets provided an alternative to the motor-dominated surface roads.Footnote 17 De Greiff et al. have called for more, holistic and transnational, studies into the history of roads, which are largely absent in the literature on the history of technology.Footnote 18 In the same vein, the car park's absence in much of the historiography on urban mobilities is surprising.Footnote 19 This article addresses the paucity in roads and car park historiography by focusing on the Hung Hom terminus, a rail, bus and automobile interchange. It is thus a ‘transmodal’ case-study, looking at both rail and road and their relationship.Footnote 20

Urban mobility in Hong Kong

Hong Kong was occupied by the British in 1841 as a colony predicated on external naval mobility, as an imperial outpost of British naval defence, and as an economic beachhead into China. As for mobility within the city, human-powered forms like sedan chairs and rickshaws were gradually replaced by mechanized vehicles.Footnote 21 On Hong Kong Island, the Peak Tram entered service in 1888, followed by the Hong Kong Tramways in 1904.Footnote 22 In 1861, the Kowloon peninsula across the Victoria Harbour was added to the colony's territories, necessitating cross-harbour inter-urban transport. By 1876, steam launches operated passenger services in the harbour; in 1933, the government granted the first cross-harbour vehicular ferry franchise.Footnote 23 Public transport service could cause considerable political controversy, for example during boycotts and strikes.Footnote 24

Private firms operated almost all forms of transport. The one exception was the KCR, operated by the Hong Kong government's Railway Department. In October 1910, the local section of the KCR was completed, and it quickly provided ‘steady third class traffic’ between Kowloon and the New Territories, the colony's hinterland leased from the Qing Empire in 1898.Footnote 25 However, the railway was largely insignificant in terms of passenger numbers for the first half-century of its existence. Lack of pre-war data precludes comparison, but Table 1 shows that after World War II, the KCR consistently accounted for less than 1 per cent of the total number of journeys on scheduled public transport, mostly because the towns along the line had low populations until the 1980s. Before the Mass Transit Railway was built in the late 1970s, the bus network was the backbone of Hong Kong's public transportation.Footnote 26 Most of the population could not afford cars.

Table 1.

Passenger journeys on scheduled public transport (in thousands). Source: Annual Digests of Statistics (Hong Kong, 1968, 1978, 1982).

Though rail passenger travel in the post-war decades was statistically insignificant, the KCR was important on two other counts. First, much of Hong Kong's food supply arrived by rail. Table 2 shows the KCR's cargo traffic in relation to cargo movement via other modes. Over 99 per cent of rail cargo traffic was imports from China, and much of this was food sold by the People's Republic of China (PRC) in order to earn foreign exchange. More important was what the KCR represented.Footnote 27 The ‘first tentacle, the first artery through which the red blood of trade will flow to and from this centre of British interests’ was first built to allay fears of a Beijing–Canton trunk line diminishing the colony's role in the China trade.Footnote 28 The KCR consistently represented hope for increased Hong Kong–China trade. This attitude persisted throughout the years. For example, one newspaper in 1975 thought ‘permanent arrangements of China supplies of raw materials…will add to our geo-political stability and to our future economic viability’.Footnote 29

Table 2.

Commercial cargo movement by mode of transport (in tonnes). Figures for 1951–66 converted from long tons. Source: Annual Digests of Statistics (Hong Kong, 1968, 1978, 1982).

Automobility gradually developed in Hong Kong. It is not known when the first automobile arrived, though in 1900 one newspaper prophesized the coming of the ‘fearsome vehicle’ that ‘strikes terror into the bravest heart’.Footnote 30 By 1907, six motor cars were registered in the colony; by 1939, this number had increased to 4,439.Footnote 31 The Hong Kong Automobile Association, dominated by male European expatriates, was formed in 1918.Footnote 32 After World War II, the number of private cars registered in Hong Kong increased over twentyfold, from 9,764 in 1951 to 211,556 in 1981. In 1951, there was one car per 206.4 people in Hong Kong; by 1981, this number was reduced to 24.4.Footnote 33 By the 1960s, planners and architects in Hong Kong, influenced by the Buchanan Report on traffic in Britain, suggested multi-level development in business centres to improve safety for pedestrians.Footnote 34 As Figure 1 shows, the growth in private car ownership far outstripped that of any other motorized vehicle in the colony. Congestion quickly became an issue due to Hong Kong's hilly terrain, its density centred on Hong Kong Island and Kowloon and the harbour between the two urban areas. Complaints about congestion were commonplace in newspapers from both motorists and public transport passengers.Footnote 35 One newspaper even took it upon itself to suggest road layout changes, which apparently alleviated congestion.Footnote 36

Figure 1.

Registration of motor vehicles in Hong Kong, 1951–981. Motorcycles: includes motorized cycles. Vans: includes goods vehicles. Motorized public transport: includes taxis, buses and minibuses. Public service vehicles: comprise the categories of ‘public cars’ and ‘crown vehicles’. Source: Annual Digests of Statistics (Hong Kong, 1968, 1978, 1982).

Buses, as mentioned above, formed the backbone of Hong Kong's public transport network after World War II. They competed directly with automobiles for road space. By 1966, journeys on Kowloon Motor Bus services (the company responsible for services in Kowloon and the New Territories) accounted for over 50 per cent of all passenger journeys.Footnote 37 In the post-war decades, the bus network coverage gradually sprawled over Hong Kong, linking villages and emerging towns with ferry piers, allowing for passengers to reach the business districts of the southern Kowloon peninsula and central Hong Kong Island. By the mid-1960s, ‘most sizeable communities in the New Territories and the outlying islands could be reached from urban Hong Kong…without change of mode’.Footnote 38

The first Kowloon terminus

From the earliest days of the railway, there had been disagreements over where the Kowloon terminus should be. In 1912, Federated Malay States government architect Arthur B. Hubback was appointed to design a terminus in Tsim Sha Tsui on the tip of the Kowloon peninsula.Footnote 39 The terminus was a grand redbrick station, and with its clock tower it became an iconic landmark of the area.Footnote 40 A bus terminus and a cross-harbour ferry pier were adjacent to the railway terminus, allowing for easy inter-modal interchange. However, it soon became obvious that the choice of location was a mistake, as it hindered development of the Kowloon peninsula and lacked the capacity to facilitate future growth in freight traffic. In 1929, a community leader opined ‘the railway stands in the way of the best development of Kowloon’ for road traffic reasons, suggesting that the station be transformed into a ‘magnificent motor vehicle terminus’ instead.Footnote 41 This was an early automobility-related reason for moving the station.

In the 1940s, two British advisors suggested moving the terminus, though for different reasons related to public and private mobilities. In 1941, David J. Owen suggested a new site half a mile east of the pre-existing station, but some wanted the station moved to Hung Hom, further east.Footnote 42 For Owen, Hong Kong was a ‘very important asset to the Empire’, and moving the terminus was necessary to ‘tap sources of trade, yet untouched, in rich territories in China and so tend to the expansion of the trade of the Port of Hong Kong’.Footnote 43 Thus, the railway was to serve both private profits and imperial goals. In 1948, famed town planner Patrick Abercrombie's radical re-envisioning of Hong Kong's urban form was published.Footnote 44 His ‘drastic’ plan for the railway was to remove the line south of the Kowloon hills entirely and to convert the approach into a ‘really modern arterial road’ to Canton. Abercrombie's new terminus would be on reclaimed land on the north-western shore of Kowloon.Footnote 45 His vision was based chiefly on local urban considerations. He mused on how a cross-harbour rail, road and pedestrian tunnel would become ‘a symbol of the unity of interests of the Colony’.Footnote 46 In the post-war spirit of reconstruction, Abercrombie foresaw a future in which improved intra-colony mobility led to a closer integration of the two urban parts of the colony. This was a public-centred vision of mobility for Hong Kong.

Apart from one year of transporting war supplies to China, goods traffic on the KCR had been disappointing since its construction.Footnote 47 For Owen, the position of the terminus was an imperial matter: improve the rail–water interface to better serve the Empire. His vision was not based on previous evidence of the KCR facilitating goods traffic; instead, he based it on the potential of mobility for imperial and private profit. But for Abercrombie, this was a local matter: he aimed to make long-term plans for the colony holistically. Though both were British colonial experts, brought in for their planning expertise, their visions differed. Abercrombie's suggestions were not heeded, owing to factors external to Hong Kong, most significantly the huge increase in population following the resumption of the Chinese civil war and the Communist takeover of China.Footnote 48

In 1957, British consultants suggested a new terminus, with room for expansion, on the Hung Hom reclamation.Footnote 49 The Public Works Department (PWD) wanted the new station to run at the same capacity, but the Railway Department emphasized interchange facilities between the station and the harbour for both freight and passengers.Footnote 50 The consultants urged the government to go beyond ‘a like for like replacement of facilities’, which could ‘prevent future expansion and development’.Footnote 51 For the PWD, the move away from Tsim Sha Tsui was necessitated by a local need to develop the area, free up land and facilitate smoother road communications in Kowloon. For the Railway Department, the move represented a chance to expand the terminus facilities and to serve increased traffic, in both passengers and cross-border freight. The two government departments espoused competing visions of the railway's purpose. Surprised by the report, the government's Executive Council decided not to act on the recommendations.

The Railway Department, headed at various times by a general manager or a chief engineer, was responsible solely for the KCR. Though the railway began as a cross-border railway, after the founding of the PRC in 1949 the passenger service mostly served local passengers, as part of Hong Kong's public transport network. Fares rose infrequently in the post-war decades, and the railway had no projects requiring large capital investments. The only potential for growth was the eventual revival of the China service. As noted above, in terms of passenger numbers the railway lagged far behind the buses. The Railway Department catered to a small constituency – the KCR's few passengers. On the other hand, the PWD was responsible for a wide array of factors in the colony's built infrastructure. By 1965, the PWD oversaw port works, roads and traffic, sewerage and drainage, architecture and town planning.Footnote 52 In this regard, the PWD saw the railway as a small part of the colony's wider public transport network, with less than 1 per cent of the passenger numbers, and did not foresee an increase in the near future. Therefore, a station running at the same capacity would suffice.

The increase in road traffic would soon necessitate a move. As noted previously, the number of vehicles on Hong Kong's roads, especially private motor cars, soared after the war. By the 1960s, the Tsim Sha Tsui terminus was becoming untenable, not because of structural issues with the building or an uptick in cross-border goods traffic, but because of worsening congestion. Concurrently, the government was frantically building new roads across the colony to meet increasing demand.Footnote 53 The Hong Kong Executive Council thought the terminus should be moved ‘as soon as was practicable’.Footnote 54 The tracks leading to the Tsim Sha Tsui terminus bisected the Kowloon peninsula, hampering effective land-use in a territory where land was perceived as scarce.Footnote 55 By 1964, preparations for the move to Hung Hom were set into motion.Footnote 56 However, the move was delayed, due to factors relating to the new terminus’ interface with other modes of transport.

The terminus’ links with other modes of transport

A cross-harbour road link had been considered as early as 1902, and Abercrombie's grandiose plans for a tunnel were discussed earlier in the article. In the late 1950s, it was thought that a bridge between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island was viable, but later, a tunnel was deemed more appropriate, after complaints from the aviation and maritime industries.Footnote 57 As the vehicular ferries were quickly becoming inadequate due to increasing traffic, in 1963 the government decided to forgo normal tendering procedures and granted a concession to a new company set up to build and operate a tunnel.Footnote 58 The Cross-Harbour Tunnel opened in August 1972, the second of Hong Kong's major road tunnels.Footnote 59

Rather than prioritizing either public or private mobility, however, the design of the Cross-Harbour Tunnel and its interface with the KCR was an attempt to balance both the public and the private. Not only was the tunnel built for automobility reasons, but it was also to alleviate pressure on the ferries and to bolster bus transport. The tunnel's toll plaza included a large bus interchange, which served new cross-harbour bus services between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island.Footnote 60 In 1967, the railway terminus’ move to Hung Hom was delayed so that the toll plaza's design could be improved.Footnote 61 ‘Unless the railways were moved at the same time as the tunnel was constructed’, noted a PWD official in 1969, ‘the area could turn out to be a mess at a later date.’Footnote 62 The tunnel was meant to mesh with the KCR at Hung Hom as a transport interchange, allowing for easy transfers between rail and bus. In this regard, the KCR was part of an integrated public transport policy.

Thus, rather than a solely automobility-serving road infrastructure, the design of the Cross-Harbour Tunnel in relation to the KCR complicates the dichotomy between public and private forms of mobilities. Another example of this was how the new terminus was affected by plans for what would later become the Mass Transit Railway. By the mid-1960s, planning was underway for an underground mass transit system, to be operated by a statutory corporation, government-owned but highly autonomous.Footnote 63 The plan in 1967 included a Hung Hom underground mass transit station with ‘direct transfer’ to the railway terminus.Footnote 64 Delays occurred after space was reserved underground and different piling techniques were used, both at increased costs, to avoid potentially costlier work later.Footnote 65 Hung Hom was to be a node between surface rail, underground rail, automobile and bus traffic. The next section further explores the automobile component of the site.

Multi-storey car park

To go directly above the station was a multi-storey car park. The first multi-storey car park in Hong Kong opened on Hong Kong Island in December 1957.Footnote 66 Motorists soon complained it was inadequate.Footnote 67 There was even one suggestion for a multi-storey car park to be built over the Tsim Sha Tsui railway terminus.Footnote 68 The first multi-storey car park in Kowloon entered service on 11 January 1965.Footnote 69 However, disputes over parking continued. In one instance, a ‘small-time expatriate civil servant’ left notes on cars in public parking spaces to secure spaces for himself, for which he was decried in the press.Footnote 70 In 1970, a mass brawl between hardware store workers armed with metal rods was reported to be over parking spaces.Footnote 71

The plan to build a multi-storey car park on a podium over the Hung Hom terminus was never in question. The idea was that motorists could park their cars in the car park and change onto the KCR for trains to the New Territories, onto cross-harbour buses to Hong Kong Island, or onto the underground rail. The car park thus served both private and public mobility. As early as 1964, the PWD recommended multi-storey car parks above the station.Footnote 72 Multi-storey car parks were built across Britain in the 1960s, and Preston bus station, a brutalist behemoth with a multi-storey car park in its design, was a standout piece of ‘traffic architecture’.Footnote 73 One PWD engineer emphasized that the Hung Hom terminus car park should be ‘made as large as possible compatible with the restrictions of the site’.Footnote 74 In negotiations with the Hong Kong financial secretary, the car park was seen as integral to the entire scheme of the station move.Footnote 75 By the time the station entered service, the car park was given almost as much publicity as the station itself, being described as ‘the most conspicuous feature on the skyline’ in the area.Footnote 76 It was to be the symbol of a modern railway terminus, to the extent that, in an unfinished state, the car park and terminus hosted Queen Elizabeth II during her visit to the colony in 1975. ‘Progress Hong Kong’, the name of a trade exhibition, was daubed over the car park's exterior.Footnote 77 Figure 2 shows the cubical car park above the railway station and bus interchange.

Figure 2.

The Hung Hom terminus and multi-storey car park, as seen from Cross-Harbour Tunnel entrance. Source: ‘Kowloon Station, Hung Hom’, c. 1970s, S2008.0091, University of Hong Kong Libraries Special Collections.

This positive image did not last for long. KCR General Manager Reginald Gregory called the car park a ‘wasted opportunity’ that prevented the ‘maximum exploitation of space’.Footnote 78 The vertical clearance was not enough for one motorist, who scraped the top of his van on the air-conditioning unit at the entrance of the station.Footnote 79 One suggestion was to turn the car park into a planetarium.Footnote 80 With a staff shortage and poor usage numbers, the top three floors were converted into a temporary sports centre less than two years after the car park's opening.Footnote 81 This proved popular, but the opening of the nearby Hung Hom coliseum, the development of the nearby land and the electrification of the KCR drove up demand for parking spaces.Footnote 82

Automobility's proliferation had its limits, as the struggle with filling up the car park illustrates. David Edgerton has shown that novel technologies, in this case, a multi-storey car park in a public transport complex, need not be immediately disruptive, as old technologies persist and co-exist with the new.Footnote 83 Here, there was another reason behind the poor initial take-up, this time to do with international flows of fuel. As Figure 1 shows, although car ownership numbers increased dramatically from the 1950s onwards, there was a slight dip in the mid-1970s. The government attributed this to increased vehicle licensing fees, introduced in the budget in 1974 ostensibly as a measure to raise money for various public works schemes as well as to limit the number of vehicles on the roads.Footnote 84 However, this coincided with the global oil crisis of 1973–74. The financial secretary was at pains to stress that Hong Kong had not been too badly affected by the oil crisis, but the cost-of-living crisis badly affected key components of the ‘car system’, namely fuel and tyres.Footnote 85 The oil crisis was one event in a wider process of reconciling automobility with environmental concerns in Britain and Japan.Footnote 86 Though car ownership in Hong Kong continued to rise after this brief blip, this episode shows how local automobility needs interacted with global economic trends. Mass car ownership facilitated local flows of people, hitherto unattainable with public transport or walking, but automobility itself was contingent on global flows of fuel and energy.

Facilities for Chinese freight

The almost intuitive designation of the KCR as a part of Hong Kong's public transport network is complicated by its freight operations. As detailed above, the lack of expansion potential for freight hampered the former Kowloon terminus. As early as 1929, a newspaper editorial suggested the KCR would remain ‘a mere tramway service’ indefinitely unless the terminus was moved to Hung Hom to better facilitate freight traffic.Footnote 87 A British wartime report noted the terminus’ lack of sufficient space for growth and ‘meagre’ marshalling facilities.Footnote 88 The railway's first post-war annual report warned the freight facilities would soon be ‘inadequate’.Footnote 89 The hoped-for trade never came, due to world war, civil war and the Communist takeover of China in 1949. Instead, a steady southbound traffic of foodstuffs gradually developed after the Korean War and the subsequent US trade embargo on the PRC. By early 1950, the Railway Department confirmed that the vast majority of that trade was conducted with PRC state agencies.Footnote 90 Thus, although the railway's passenger traffic was part of the colony's public transport network, the cargo traffic fulfilled the PRC's need for foreign exchange.Footnote 91 As an underfunded single-track line, capacity that could have served passengers was instead used for Chinese state cargo. This complicates the view of a government-run railway as a natural component of the public transport network. Whilst other transport modes in Hong Kong were privately owned, they all had the aim of moving Hong Kong's people. The one government-managed exception instead ran its cargo operations for the Chinese regime's foreign exchange needs.

This conflict between the KCR as a public, passenger-carrying railway and as a PRC-aiding cargo railway is illustrated by tensions between two engineering visions espoused at around the time of the new terminus’ completion. After Reginald Gregory was appointed general manager in April 1974, the railway looked towards increased trade with China again. Gregory was previously an engineer on British Railways’ London Midland region and was later seconded to Sri Lanka and Ghana as a financial and managerial advisor.Footnote 92 His appointment in Hong Kong signalled a change in the government's intentions. In his first months on the new job, Gregory frequently spoke in public about how China's freight output to Hong Kong would increase and how the KCR would accommodate it.Footnote 93 This was a break from the inward-looking railway administration of the two decades prior. In December 1974, Gregory visited China, the first official trip there by a KCR general manager since 1949, and would visit annually throughout his tenure.Footnote 94 Even before the completion of the new terminus, he suggested that parts of the multi-storey car park above the station should be converted into a warehouse for the China Travel Service (CTS), the Chinese state organization responsible for freight traffic.Footnote 95

Gregory was at odds with engineers in the PWD's Railway Division, for whom the KCR was primarily a local railway for local passengers. These engineers had been in the colony for longer and had different visions for both the terminus and the railway itself. Kafayat Rahmani described the Hung Hom project as a ‘civil engineer's dream’.Footnote 96 He was in East Africa before arriving in Hong Kong in 1971.Footnote 97 Siema Grunberg, chief engineer in the Railway Division, had been in Hong Kong since 1964 and saw the project from inception to completion.Footnote 98 Grunberg's father built parts of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and the younger Grunberg had worked on railways since 1935; like Gregory, he had experience in Ghana and the London Midlands region.

Despite their strikingly similar professional experiences, Gregory and Grunberg had vastly different visions of the railway. Gregory, with his secondments to former colonies at an early stage of his career, became what Donna Mehos and Suzanne Moon have described as a technical expert in a decolonizing world who provided portable expertise. Rahmani and especially Grunberg, on the other hand, had place-specific knowledge, due to their long stays in Hong Kong.Footnote 99 The ‘portable’ expert saw the KCR as a cross-border freight and passenger railway; the engineers with local expertise saw the line through the lens of local public transport. Gregory's vision, espoused through skilful use of print and broadcast media, promised a return to a mythical railway past, in which the KCR took its rightful place as the British extension of the Chinese railway network, connecting China with the rest of the world. It was a vision based on the potential of mobility. Grunberg's vision was grounded in the lived experiences of the KCR. It was a part of a public transport network first, and a cross-border freight facilitator a distant second.

An article by the PWD engineers reveals the differences in these visions for Kowloon. Freight facilities were given less attention than the expanded passenger facilities. Their explanation for why the station had to be moved only mentioned local passenger services and land utilization reasons: the new terminus’ ‘adequate holding space’ would prevent overcrowding and would allow for better land use, as the railway would no longer bisect the Kowloon peninsula.Footnote 100 Though they acknowledged the growth of goods traffic on the KCR, freight facilities were only given passing references. Better track alignment also meant better road layout, thus improving road mobility. For the PWD's engineers, passenger traffic was key. Since direct passenger traffic to Canton had been suspended since 1949, there was no mention of this in their article. For Grunberg and Rahmani, this was a local railway terminus that happened to also serve cross-border freight.

But for Gregory, this was a local line with international potential. The line could tap into China's interior. Soon after his arrival in Hong Kong, he suggested ‘essential’ changes to the layout of the new terminus’ goods yard to cope with increased freight traffic from China.Footnote 101 He tried to secure some land near new railway workshops in Sha Tin for a CTS-owned warehouse, since no space was allocated to the CTS at the new terminus.Footnote 102 Grunberg defended the designs which predated Gregory's arrival; since the CTS had known for years that the terminus would be moved but did not apply for any facilities until March 1974, ‘it has only itself to blame’.Footnote 103 The tension between the railway as a public transport component and as a cross-border freight line for non-public benefit led to persistent bickering between the engineers.

Gregory looked for ways to accommodate the CTS at Hung Hom. Later in 1974, he allowed the CTS to use the transit shed and half of the goods office at Hung Hom.Footnote 104 Eventually, he was able to secure a standalone site in Hung Hom for the CTS.Footnote 105 In 1979, this site was sold, ostensibly via public auction, to the CTS for HK$33.8 million.Footnote 106 Though Gregory had left Hong Kong by this stage, he got his way.Footnote 107 The Hung Hom site conformed to his vision for the KCR: a railway that catered for Chinese trade, the purpose it was created for and fought for by British interests at the beginning of the century. The vision of the terminus as a local, public mobility facilitator in the post-war period was replaced by that imagined by Gregory, the terminus as a facilitator of Chinese freight.

The new terminus in the press

Though the new Hung Hom terminus’ opening was meant to signal the start of a new and modern KCR, it instead provided an opportunity to reflect on the railway's role in Hong Kong. Newspaper commentators agreed that the KCR was underfunded and underdeveloped, and therefore one strand of public discourse was on the railway's shortcomings as part of the local public transport system. One tabloid noted how the ‘KCR for many years operated virtually in the doldrums and its profits were not ploughed back into its development’.Footnote 108 Another held the government directly responsible for withholding much-needed investment from the railway, which meant it was ‘left behind by the two bus companies and the various ferry routes’; it also claimed the Railway Department used the new terminus as a ‘scapegoat’ to deflect all criticism.Footnote 109

Other newspapers focused on the KCR's potential role in the New Towns project, a positive outlook on the railway's future position in the city's public transport network. The Express thought that adequate public transport via the KCR was a vital prerequisite to the New Towns project's success.Footnote 110 Referring to a projected population increase in the New Towns, the Star considered the KCR to have ‘a very definite and essential role to play in New Territories development’, whilst the South China Morning Post thought the terminus was ‘long overdue’, especially due to growing populations in Sha Tin and Tai Po.Footnote 111 Thus, some newspapers focused on the railway's role in Hong Kong's public transport network. The new terminus would funnel in commuters from the projected New Towns into urban Kowloon, fulfilling its role as a site of local public mobility.

The railway's cross-border element also came under scrutiny. After praising the new terminus, the Hong Kong Daily News looked forward to a reinstatement of the through passenger train to Canton.Footnote 112 For the Sing Pao, no matter how modern the new terminus was, the through train was the railway's raison d'être: ‘The biggest mission of the new station is to take on the mission of the direct Kowloon–Canton through train. Before this is realized, a magnificent, perfect Hung Hom terminus cannot fulfil people's needs.’Footnote 113 Rather than the cross-border passenger service, the Sing Tao Jih Pao focused on freight:

In the past, this city was merely a re-export station for freight between China and overseas. At that time, KCR trains could go straight to Canton, with the possibility of further connections. Since the mainland became Communist, these re-export opportunities were lost, and the KCR's freight traffic underwent some dismal days until recently, when freight traffic has quickly increased. But the present traffic is different: in the past, the KCR's freight traffic was mostly foreign goods destined for China, but now it is mostly mainland products for Hong Kong or for re-export to other ports. In terms of goods destined for this city, as long as Hong Kong's position is unchanged, it should continue to increase. As for re-exports, the future is unclear, as the Chinese Communists may soon expand the facilities of the various ports on the coast, to replace this city's transhipment role. Therefore, the KCR's main mission in transport is mainly focused on the section from the Kowloon peninsula to Lo Wu, the so-called British Section, and the core should be the supply of materials to Hong Kong.Footnote 114

Thus, newspapers in Hong Kong did not agree as to the railway and its new terminus’ most important role. Was this a part of the local public transport network first and foremost? Or was its role as a ‘tentacle’ of trade paramount? That tension continuously played out during the planning of the Hung Hom terminus and continued to be debated.

Conclusion

The construction of the Hung Hom railway terminus brought together different, competing visions of urban mobility in Hong Kong. This article has shown that these competing visions of the railway and its terminus led to negotiations and conflicts. Through looking at the interactions, connections and competition between different mobilities, this transmodal study has shown that simple dichotomies of public and private mobilities are not enough to describe Hong Kong's mobility-scape.

Besides redressing a lacuna in the Hong Kong transport history and in the histories of roads, this article has brought into relief some issues with basic dichotomies of public and private urban transport. This article has shown that whilst the designation of a government-owned railway as public transport appears straightforward at first glance, this is less simple when we consider its role as a cargo-carrying railway, mostly for the foreign exchange needs of another government. This tension between the public and the China-oriented forms of traffic on the KCR continuously played out over the decades. This article has also shown the limits of a straightforward ‘private’ delineation for automobility. The planned integration of automobile, surface rail, underground rail and bus transport on the site of the Hung Hom terminus shows different forms of public and private urban mobilities entangling together.

What are some of the implications of this case-study? To begin with the local: if, according to Tim Edensor, there are national forms of automobility, then Hong Kong can be argued to have a distinctive civic/municipal automobility, or at least a municipal ‘motorscape’, with the ubiquitous multi-storey car park.Footnote 115 Large vertical complexes proliferated across Hong Kong, often with a shopping mall on the lowest levels, a multi-storey car park either above the mall or underground and office or residential tower blocks extending upwards, access to which is provided by a podium.Footnote 116 In a city where land is perceived to be at a premium, the vertical multi-storey car park is seen as a logical solution to the parking problem. The Hung Hom terminus site, with its multi-storey car park and stadium, was an early symptom of this trend.Footnote 117

As for wider implications, Hong Kong was a forerunner in privatized public transport. As noted throughout this article, most of the public transport modes were operated by private companies. The Railway Department was ‘hived off’ into a statutory corporation in 1983.Footnote 118 The government's lack of interest in operating mobility infrastructures meant even the container terminal was not funded by public funds, a rare exception globally.Footnote 119 Hong Kong has long been used by neoliberal thinkers as a model to learn from.Footnote 120 As debates continue globally over how to categorize different forms of transport, a reappraisal of the parameters should be useful.

Acknowledgments

I must thank John M. Carroll, Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, Robert Bickers, Vivian Kong, Thomas Larkin, Sam Wetherell and the members of the Hong Kong Studies Study Group for their guidance and comments on earlier drafts, and David Clayton, Jack Greatrex and Leena Lindell for insightful conversations on railway stations.

Funding statement

Research for this article was enabled by funding from the HKU Postgraduate Scholarship and HKU Foundation Postgraduate Fellowship.

Competing interests

The author declares none.

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Figure 0

Table 1. Passenger journeys on scheduled public transport (in thousands). Source: Annual Digests of Statistics (Hong Kong, 1968, 1978, 1982).

Figure 1

Table 2. Commercial cargo movement by mode of transport (in tonnes). Figures for 1951–66 converted from long tons. Source: Annual Digests of Statistics (Hong Kong, 1968, 1978, 1982).

Figure 2

Figure 1. Registration of motor vehicles in Hong Kong, 1951–981. Motorcycles: includes motorized cycles. Vans: includes goods vehicles. Motorized public transport: includes taxis, buses and minibuses. Public service vehicles: comprise the categories of ‘public cars’ and ‘crown vehicles’. Source: Annual Digests of Statistics (Hong Kong, 1968, 1978, 1982).

Figure 3

Figure 2. The Hung Hom terminus and multi-storey car park, as seen from Cross-Harbour Tunnel entrance. Source: ‘Kowloon Station, Hung Hom’, c. 1970s, S2008.0091, University of Hong Kong Libraries Special Collections.