May 2006
Rail 540: Railway passed from one ‘safe pair of hands’ to another
Although new Transport Secretary Douglas Alexander is probably just keeping the seat warm, CHRISTIAN WOLMAR advises him to stay on ...
PPP lesson for new boy Alexander
One hopes that Douglas Alexander, the new man at the Department for Transport, is looking closely at events on the ...
Time to rein in water companies
As the threat of standpipes appearing on our street corners becomes ever greater, the water companies are laughing all the ...
Trouble ahead on the rails?
On the face of it, the railways are the least of the problems facing the new transport secretary, Douglas Alexander ...
Metronet fails the PPP test
You could hardly call the recent warm weather a heatwave. And yet here we are once again with the Tube ...
Rail 539: Why we must cross-question the logic of Crossrail scheme
The more CHRISTIAN WOLMAR looks at Crossrail, the less attractive it becomes, with nearly as many people being inconvenienced by ...
Dunstable, a small town tragedy or how not to do things
When the National Audit Office’s report on something bizarrely named ‘the A5 queue relocation scheme’ plopped into my inbox, I ...
Transport Secretary for a day
7 30am A difficult breakfast meeting. David Rowlands, the permanent secretary, was none too pleased at being told he was ...
Book review: Andrew Hosken’s Nothing like a dame
Andrew Hosken, Nothing like a dame, the scandals of Shirley Porter 372 pages, Granta, £20 This is not a normal ...
An example not to follow
It is ten years since the first privatised train travelled from Twickenham, home of the famous rugby ground in the ...
The story no one tells – how safety is improving
This is tempting fate but it is important to point out just how much the safety record of public transport ...