Christian Wolmar

The SRA’s announcement on the scope of the Greater Western franchise is an ominous indication of how the railway is going to be chipped away little by little, claims CHRISTIAN WOLMAR. The squeeze begins. There is not going to be a Beeching style announcement of a massive cut in the railway network with the closure of hundreds of stations and dozens of lines. Instead, it will be a series of little ...

When Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac meet today, the EU constitutional treaty will not be the only grandiose but doomed European project they discuss. Eurotunnel, owner of the channel tunnel, looks set finally to go bust within weeks now, after years of staggering under colossal debts. Chirac may well cave in to demands to offer some solace to the shareholders, 80 per cent of whom are French. Yet Blair ...

As the much-praised new control centres demonstrate, the network is being reintegrated - but it's being done slowly and by stealth rather than overnight, CHRISTIAN WOLMAR believes. The ungrammatical New Labour slogan of ‘forwards not back’ may have got them back into Downing Street, but it is not always right. Indeed, in many ways the railway has to go back to go forwards, and relearn the skills that were lost in ...

Transport is something that we all need but nobody wants. This poses a fundamental question for the state: should it encourage more transport, which after all increases GDP and economic growth, or should it attempt to limit the use of transport because of its damaging environmental effects? Ever since coming to power, the Blair government has never addressed this issue. Indeed, transport has been a no go policy zone. New Labour ...