Friday, March 12, 2010

Christian Wolmar

Britain’s leading transport commentator

Archive of November, 2004

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Subterranean Railway Review
The London Underground needs a fortune spent on it. The Government doesn’t want to know but the fat cats of the private sector are enthusiastic. The Tube even tempts executives from the US to cross the Atlantic.
The press and public are sceptical. However, and all the more so when one of the boosters [...]

The media coverage of the Berkshire train crash was remarkably restrained. There have been few calls for radical improvements in safety and many editorials have pointed to the railways’ excellent safety record.
The exception was Bob Crow, the RMT union leader, who, true to form, tried to exploit the situation by suggesting that the railways were [...]

Nov 20

Tunnel Vision

Subterranean Railway Review
Few Londoners have a good word for the Underground. Every day something seems to go wrong — faulty signals (even on the new section of the Jubilee Line), an “incident” (ie, suicide) on the line, engineering works. So rare is a day without a hold-up that the management now boasts of “good service” [...]

Nov 19

140 years of hell on the Tube

Subterranean Railway Review
Londoners are profoundly ambivalent about the Underground. We dislike it, we mistrust it, but we know we can’t do without it. The complaints have remained constant throughout the system’s 140-year history. It is too crowded, too noisy, too expensive, too stuffy, too unreliable. Yet if it did not exist, London would be a [...]

Subterranean Railway Review
Christian Wolmar is a Pullman among story tellers. It helps that he is personally involved – ‘when I was a child’ he writes, ‘I used to be haunted by the sound of ghostly horns echoing through the night near Campden Hill where I lived…It was the Underground which used to keep me awake’.
The [...]

Nov 11

Metro Subterranean Railway Review

There are probably more books about railways published in the UK each month than on any other subject. The trouble is most of them are written by enthusiasts for enthusiasts and don’t have much appeal outside that select group. Christian Wolmar’s new book is the exception. This is that genuine rarity: an entertaining read by [...]

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