Christian Wolmar

Celebrating ten years as RAIL's controversial but acclaimed columnist, CHRISTIAN WOLMAR reflects on a decade of commentating on a momentous era in the railway industry. Allow me the rare indulgence, dear reader, of harking back in time and taking a long trip down memory lane. This is the tenth anniversary of writing this column which first appeared in the Raildated Sep 27 – Oct 10 1995 giving me the opportunity to reflect ...

THE IDEA of charging motorists up to £20 to go to Heathrow along the M4 may only be kite-flying by the Department for Transport at present, but it is the sort of idea that is going to creep up the political agenda as the roads become increasingly congested. One way or another motorists will be paying much more in future. Heathrow has a particular problem. The Government would like to ...

The decision not to prosecute railway managers over the Ladbroke Grove accident was inevitable. Indeed, that decision had already been taken by the Crown Prosecution Service, only for it to be re-examined at the behest of politicians following pressure from the survivors and bereaved. That was bound to be a waste of time. The sheer complexity of railway accidents – like the one at Hatfield which resulted in a failed ...

One of the little considered aspects of public transport provision is gender. It is conventional wisdom within the industry that most bus riders during the day are women of a certain age but little is done specifically to accommodate them. The report by the Equal Opportunities Commission into gender equality on public transport raises a lot of fundamental questions about the planning of routes and services. Indeed, they are often designed ...

The grandly titled High Level Output Statement will simply gives a scientific veneer to the flawed process of deciding what sort of infrastructure should be available for operators under privatisation, contends CHRISTIAN WOLMAR. HLOS is going to become a term familiar to Rail readers. This unprepossessing acronym stands for High Level Output Statement and is the key to what sort of railway we will have from 2009. The process of determining that has just ...

The Hatfield verdict illustrates the difficulty of pinning the blame for accidents on particular individuals within a company and highlights the pitfalls for the government in trying to create an offence of corporate manslaughter. There is no doubt that the Hatfield accident was caused by incompetence on a grand scale. The trouble is that there were many people who made mistakes, some of them too low down in the hierarchy ...