Christian Wolmar

The new model of privatisation is far preferable to its discredited predecessor but, asks CHRISTIAN WOLMAR, do we still need so many organisations with a finger in the infrastructure pie? The consultation document produced by the Strategic Rail Authority on the West Coast Route Modernisation is a masterful effort in both senses of the word. Not only is it a remarkably clever digging out of a very tough hole, but it ...

The senior civil servant who pushed through rail privatisation admits in a forthcoming television programme he knew that the whole idea was flawed from the start. Patrick Brown, the permanent secretary at the Department of Transport in the early 1990s, says in a BBC 4 programme, Witness to history: privatising the railways that it was the Treasury’s insistence which resulted in the separation of the infrastructure and the operations, a split ...

The takeover of Railtrack by Network Rail has rightly been welcomed across the industry, but the new organisation will never truly get a grip on spiralling costs until it brings maintenance and renewal back in-house, warns CHRISTIAN WOLMAR. So farewell Ailtrack, as it was called in the last press release I received from the Black Tower, and hello Network Rail, aka Notwork Rail as the tabloids will dub it if things ...

Train operators want to have their franchise cake and eat it, pocketing the profits when successful and yet scurrying to the Government for help when times are hard. CHRISTIAN WOLMAR urges SRA Chairman Richard Bowker to use the same response as Bumble the Beadle gave Oliver in Dickens’s novel. The moment when Railtrack went on to the critical list in the intensive care ward was not, as many commentators have argued, ...

The issue of local versus national interest has been a perennial theme surrounding local government ever since the first local clan chief came up against a king seeking more cash to pay for his next war, probably some time in the Dark Ages. After I spoke recently at the Association of London Government conference, several councillors wanted to discuss their particular problems. Many had only been elected for the first ...