Rail 686: Another momentous year on the tracks – and mystic Wolmar

December 22nd, 2011 Rail Magazine View Comments
At the beginning of 2011 I wrote that it would be a momentous year. I’m not sure that it has actually quite lived up to that billing. Although there’s been no shortage of drama and excitement, the weakness of the McNulty report, hijacked by a minister who delved deep into the detail of what interested him – and railway finances certainly did – means that in essence it is ‘steady ...

Cycle deaths becoming political issue

November 15th, 2011 Surveyor View Comments
The issue of cycling deaths has soared up the political agenda in recent months, especially in London where every fatality is covered extensively on regional TV news, the Evening Standard and local papers. No longer are these deaths simply accepted as an inevitable consequence of the imbalance between motor vehicles weighing several tons and the unprotected bodies of unlucky cyclists. Instead, cycling accidents are now understood to be a direct consequence ...
January 16th, 2012

Robert Horton obit (add)

: Robert Horton played a crucial and controversial role in the privatisation of Britain’s railways in the mid 1990s and can be characterised to some extent as the villain of the piece. The largely ‘back of an envelope’ privatisation scheme put forward hastily by the Tories after their surprise 1992 election victory envisaged Railtrack, responsible for the track and infrastructure of the railways, remaining in public ownership at least until ...
January 11th, 2012

HS2 case based on dodgy methodology

Given the scale and cost of HS2, the case to build the line rests on remarkably shaky foundations. The government relies very strongly on what it calls the “business case” which is, in fact, a complex and fairly flaky methodology that tries to assess the wider long-term costs and benefits of the project and ascribes monetary values to aspects such as environmental degradation and business. A complex equation ...

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