Principal Investigator Anne McCants
Project Website http://www.mitportugal.org/latest/railroads-in-historical-context-construction-…
The FOZTUA Project is a joint interdisciplinary project between MIT (USA) and University of Minho (Portugal), sponsored by EDP and under the auspices of the MIT Portugal Program. The project aims to study, preserve and disseminate the memory of the Tua Valley and its historically significant narrow gauge railroad.
The project is also the basis of two PhD theses, one of which is from Bruno Gonçalves, MIT Portugal Program PhD student at Doctoral Program Leaders for Technical Industries (LTI), that is studying the Long term material and structural behavior: reverse engineering of Tua railways works and the use of advanced technologies of Life Cycle Assessment of infrastructures. The project also has supported several MSc dissertations, some already closed and others going on. A team from LTI also designed a transportable and easy to use family railrider [video] powered by two bicycles giving origin to a transportable prototype for modern ages . The project was Integrated on the 1st year LTI Product Design and Development course, by Carlos Barbosa, João Figueiredo, Jorge Marques, Lídia Teixeira, Miguel Oliveira, Eduardo Beira and António Araújo.
The coordination of the project is also supported by Anne McCants (History Dpt., MIT, USA) ; José Manuel Cordeiro (Institute of Social Sciences, University of Minho) and Paulo Lourenço (School of Engineering, University of Minho). The international team of scholars assisting with the project also includes numerous scholars from across Portugal as well as members from Great Britain, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Canada and the United States.