Christian Wolmar

Light rail schemes are notorious for their high capital costs, but CHRISTIAN WOLMAR believes there is another, cheaper way forward for tramway projects that should be taken more seriously. The clearest casualties of the cost escalation on the railways have been tram schemes. When John Prescott published his ten year transport plan five years ago, he promised there would be up to 25 new light rail lines in major cities by ...

In his annual summer-holiday assessment of pupils’ performance of in the Railway School, Headmaster CHRISTIAN WOLMAR finds them a little too willing to stuff themselves with goodies from the government. It is time for the annual report from the Headmaster of the Railway School and it has been another busy year in the Railway School with, again (sigh), a series of expulsions including one involving the whole class, lots of reorganisation, ...

Station improvements are another issue where wishful thinking has triumphed over the tortuous financial realities of privatisation, argues CHRISTIAN WOLMAR. Stations have become the Cinderella of the rail network. Remember those promises that under privatisation the train companies would be liberated from the constraints of public spending limits and therefore investment would pour into stations? Well it seems that this hasn't happened. A sober report from the National Audit Office Maintaining and Improving ...

The privatisation of Britain’s rail network by the last Conservative government was, and still is, a highly controversial issue. But whatever you think you know about the principles and processes, this book will increase your knowledge. Its sub-title, ‘How ideology and incompetence wrecked Britain’s railways’, hints at a tabloid journalese approach to the subject, but this is misleading. ...

Subterranean Railway Review MOST people who depend on underground railways try to avoid thinking about them. All being well, the immense difficulty of running closely sequenced trains at depths of as much as 250 feet, along tunnels that may be over a century old, will not make itself apparent during the slog from home to office. When the challenges become evident, misery ...