Christian Wolmar

Ministers are preparing ways of closing or "mothballing" large sections of the railway network, according to an official document which was slipped out without publicity last week. Dozens of branch lines and secondary routes could shut, in what would be the biggest rethink of the network since the Beeching report in the 1960s, which led to the closure of 4,000 miles of railway and nearly half the nation's stations. Loss-making services ...

he new London transport commissioner, Peter Hendy, will soon have a new string to his bow - running part of the rail network. Of course, he already has the Tube and the Docklands Light Railway, but the finishing touches are being put on a deal with the Department for Transport which will give Transport for London control of most of the existing Silverlink franchise when it disappears in the autumn ...

The RMT may use email to send out their press releases but that seems to be the only sign that the union is living in the 21st century. The stream of notices that plop all too frequently into my inbox are redolent of the industrial relations of the 1960s and 1970s when the bosses were the class enemy and the union was the only protection for the working man. The ...

The Greater Western franchise, with its massive premium payments, is just a cynical attempt to cash in on the good years before the operation goes belly-up in 2010, warns CHRISTIAN WOLMAR. T he detailed fi gures for the Greater Western franchise which have just been issued are an amazingly revealing guide to the government’s real intentions on the railway. And sorry, dear reader, they have sent me into rant mode, but ...

In the dog days of the Christmas and New Year break, journalists scrabbling for a story suddenly hit upon transport issues. First was the fact that Labour had failed to deliver on most of the promises in the ten-year Transport Plan published in 2000. Then there was the threat of direct action by residents near Heathrow, who are to have their homes bulldozed if a third runway is built. And, ...

The term ‘integrated transport’ has gone out of fashion largely because ministers realised that it did not mean much in the deregulated and privatised environment they seek to foster. Integration requires the kind of strong central planning and coordinated provision of services which mitigates against New Labour’s reliance on market forces and rail franchising. Nowhere is the failure to pursue an agenda of integration more apparent than in London. That is ...