Christian Wolmar

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 of the Underground outlines his code ...

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 dangerous and all level crossings should be replaced by bridges or tunnels - does he ...

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” when it means simply normal service. ...

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 different, barely tolerable city. Its unpopularity stretches ...

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 remarkably rapid development of the Metropolitan, Circle and District lines in the late 19th century ...

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 a knowledgeable journalist who can write ...