Christian Wolmar

Although new Transport Secretary Douglas Alexander is probably just keeping the seat warm, CHRISTIAN WOLMAR advises him to stay on top of the job as next year will be a vital one for the railway. The arrival of a new Transport Secretary would normally raise speculation about changes in direction, but the replacement of one Scottish lawyer with a reputation as a ‘safe pair of hands’ by another has dampened any ...

One hopes that Douglas Alexander, the new man at the Department for Transport, is looking closely at events on the London Underground, for there are lessons to be learnt from the recent failings of Metronet which recently claimed the job of its chief operating officer.Metronet, the infrastructure company responsible for the maintenance on all but three of London’s Underground lines, has had a bad month. A series of mishaps range ...

As the threat of standpipes appearing on our street corners becomes ever greater, the water companies are laughing all the way to the bank. Over the next few weeks, the annual figures of the biggest companies are expected to reveal that they have made £2bn over the past year, a rise of 15 per cent. Worse, consumers are having to pay more for their water, an average of 8.5 per ...

On the face of it, the railways are the least of the problems facing the new transport secretary, Douglas Alexander. In recent months, there has been nothing but good news on the sector. The percentage of delayed trains has finally returned to the levels before the Hatfield train accident in October 2000 and record levels of investment are going into the industry, a fact that Alistair Darling, Alexander’s predecessor, never ...

You could hardly call the recent warm weather a heatwave. And yet here we are once again with the Tube in chaos. Trains are delayed as they creep along at 20 miles per hour. Hundreds of thousands of commuters sweat. And that's when the trains are running at all: last weekend the District line was shut down completely. Meanwhile things are set to get worse, with more engineering closures at ...

The more CHRISTIAN WOLMAR looks at Crossrail, the less attractive it becomes, with nearly as many people being inconvenienced by the project as benefiting from it. I wish I could wholeheartedly believe in the Crossrail project. After all, it is the biggest rail project on the medium-term agenda - a North-South high speed link is unlikely to see the light of day until most of us are pushing up daisies, and ...