Christian Wolmar

Transport Secretary Alistair Darling’s warm words about a North- South high-speed rail link are far from a ringing endorsement of the project, claims CHRISTIAN WOLMAR. I felt the gooey consistency of egg on my face as I listened to Alistair Darling’s speech to the RAIL conference on March 15. I had been tipped off that he would be pouring cold water on the idea of a North-South high-speed line, effectively killing ...

Beware the press release slipped out on a Friday. The Department for Transport is often guilty of this attempt to take advantage of the journalistic tradition of seeking alternative occupations to sitting in the news room on a Friday afternoon, and the Department’s latest effort in this regard was an announcement about runway alternation at Heathrow. The release seemed innocuous enough, announcing that the consultation on plans to end runway ...

The decision by the Office of National Statistics that the CTRL should be included on the government’s books has exposed the pretence that it is a private sector project, argues CHRISTIAN WOLMAR. In the 14 years that I have been writing about the railways, there have been scandals that have cost the taxpayers billions. There are all kinds of little ones, such as the waste of money in drawing up tram ...

The prospect of Britain getting high-speed TGV-style trains like France and Germany will be killed off this week by the Secretary of State for Transport, Alistair Darling. Mr Darling will tell a conference of industry leaders in a keynote speech that Britain is simply not big enough to have a high-speed line as well as the existing rail and motorway links, and instead will suggest improvements to existing services as part ...

The pressure is on for the Department for Transport to cut the subsidy going to the railways. It amounts to over £5bn this year, a historically very high figure.In the short term, the only way of getting the subsidy down is to push up fares, because savings on investment or even line closures take years to feed through. That is why the Department is looking at the present fares structure ...

It is the first stage of the most ambitious engineering programme on the Tube, involving modernisation of track, signalling and stations. So surely it makes sense, as London Underground announced yesterday, to close sections of the Northern and other lines at weekends from next month, to speed up the work? Don't be so sure. As you fume sitting in traffic on a replacement bus, the inconvenience might be benefitting the ...