Christian Wolmar

The much-vaunted Public Private Partnership scheme for the London Underground - complete with 30-year contracts for the consortia involved - threatens to repeat the mistakes of the privatisation of the surface rail network, warns CHRISTIAN WOLMAR. There is another railway in the UK which carries about the same number of passengers every day as the National Rail network - two million people undertaking three million journeys. It has just 400 kilometres ...

The railways have long passed the point where simple exhortation to ‘get their act together’ will have any effect on solving the deeply ingrained problems of the industry. CHRISTIAN WOLMAR urges the new Transport Secretary to get off the fence and sanction the fundamental restructuring that even conservative commentators are now advocating. There seem to be two parallel universes as far as the future rail industry is concerned. In one, inhabited ...