Christian Wolmar

If there was an area of policy that the government could opt out of, there is no doubt that Labour would choose transport. Since 1997, there has been a series of unfortunate events ranging from rail disasters such as Ladbroke Grove and Hatfield to the fuel crisis of September 2000, and failed initiatives such as the 10 year transport plan and the creation of the Strategic Rail Authority, all of ...

Britain’s privatised railway is often said to be in a constant state of change. The reality, however, is that the structure may have been transformed - but little else has, contends CHRISTIAN WOLMAR. Writing this before the publication of either the Rail Review or the updated Ten-Year Plan allows me to look behind the immediate headlines and try to focus on the issues facing the industry once the immediate uncertainty created ...

The National Audit Office deliberately minces its words because its reports are shown to the government department concerned. So when the NAO says that there is 'limited assurance that the price of the three Tube PPPs was reasonable' that translates as - 'these are bloody awful deals that the government should never have signed and taxpayers are being ripped off mercilessly'. The PPP is, in fact, one of the great scandals ...

When Alistair Darling announced his rail review in January, long suffering rail passengers hoped that after years of chaos, the government was at last going to sort out the railways. Fat chance. Yesterday’s announcement of the results of the review show that the men (and women) in Whitehall always make sure their ministers never take any radical decisions unless they are totally unavoidable. The railways clearly needed a completely new beginning. Darling ...

After all the kafuffle, the rail review is something of a damp squib. It was announced in January by Alistair Darling, the Transport Secretary, after he became exasperated at the ability of the railways to absorb taxpayers’ money while apparently being unable to provide a decent service. There was much talk of fundamental reform for a railway which Darling had recognised was ‘dysfunctional’. The key issue was integration. The biggest mistake ...

Privatised railway chiefs like to portray themselves as buccaneering capitalists in a risk-taking industry but the reality, as CHRISTIAN WOLMAR points out, is that the Government cannot allow it to fail. The one certainty the Government gives us about the forthcoming review is that the railway shall not be renationalised. But ministers have not attempted to define where the limits of the private and public sectors should be and therefore are ...