Christian Wolmar

The Prime Minister’s brief appearance at the launch of the WCML Pendolino service could be a sign of his exasperation at the huge cost and flawed design of the project, CHRISTIAN WOLMAR believes.
Tony Blair was clearly not in celebratory mood when he addressed the audience at the celebration of the start of the full [...]

It is not surprising that polls show that most people would like the railways to be renationalised. The privatisation of the railways has not delivered the huge improvements in customer care and service quality that had been expected. Quite the opposite. Delays have got worse and the subsidies to the private companies industry are now [...]

The government set up the SRA as a quasi-independent body, but whenever its chairmen tried to exercise that independence, they were squashed by ministers. CHRISTIAN WOLMAR analyses what went wrong – and believes the late Sir Alastair Morton may have been judged too harshly.
The Strategic Rail Authority was cursed from the outset. It certainly [...]

Sir Alastair Morton, who has died of a heart attack at the age of 66, was the man who got the Channel Tunnel built. Without his drive and energy in rescuing a project in deep trouble when he was appointed as co-chairman in early 1987, it is doubtful that the link between Britain and France [...]

So the merry go round continues. FirstGroup is awarded the Scotrail franchise although it was not deemed good enough to run Anglia where First Great Eastern built up a good reputation. However, the reverse applies to National Express, now booted out of the Scottish franchise. Virtually every franchise that has been relet has gone to [...]

I nearly did not write this column. It was just too bad. There are so many ways of failing at cricket and somehow I seemed to have run the whole gamut in May and June. After two winters of training in an effort to get my maiden century, it felt like the whole enterprise was [...]