Christian Wolmar

With privatisation frequently held as the ultimate model of how to run a railway, Christian Wolmar believes that Britain’s failure to learn from the country’s successful privatisation experience was a great missed opportunity.
The success of the Japanese railways has often been presented in Britain as irrelevant to our situation because of the huge cultural differences [...]

The concierge looks at you through the glass door before pushing the buzzer to let you in. ‘Can I help you’ says the middle age black woman once you enter the lobby, a large wood and glass oval shaped room.
This is not some swanky Parisian apartment block but a council estate which used to have [...]

The railway has admirably fulfilled its traditional summer role as silly season Aunt Sally for the media but, points out Christian Wolmar, the problems it faced were not just figments of news starved journalists’ imaginations.
The railways are often a good source of silly season stories during the lean summer news-free months but this year has [...]

The news that Connex is cutting services into London Bridge to ensure better punctuality must seem like the last straw for many London commuters. Over the past few weeks, rail passengers have suffered from a series of blows, including a slowdown in much of the network because of the fear of rails buckling in the [...]

The theme over the copious English breakfasts during the Beamers’ tour of Somerset was to attribute cricketing definitions to the names of local villages. Some are so obvious that one wonders why they have not already entered the English language: Clatworthy, for example, barely needs explanation as a poor spell of bowling from the batsman’s [...]