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 [...]
Archive of November, 2004
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” [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]