Christian Wolmar

The climate on climate change is changing. At last year’s Labour Party conference, there was still a debate about how serious an issue it was; if politicians mentioned it at all, it was as an afterthought. Now it has become a mainstream political issue. In Manchester this year, there was barely a significant speech that did not touch on it, and the fringe meetings on the subject attracted big audiences. Even ...

Everyone’s familiar with the double standards applied by government to road and rail schemes, but CHRISTIAN WOLMAR has detected signs that the pace of line and station reopenings could be picking up. IT’S rough getting between Swindon and Gloucester. On the railways, the trains have to negotiate a 14-mile stretch which was singled in the 1970s in some misguided cost-cutting exercise initiated by British Rail under pressure from the Treasury. It ...

THE decline of GNER, one of Britain's best rail companies, into near bankruptcy is an indictment of the way that the railways have still not adapted to privatisation a decade after they were first sold off. GNER will be lucky to survive much beyond Christmas. Its most immediate problem is the crisis at its parent company, Sea Containers, which last week sought protection under Chapter 11, a procedure of American company ...

Over the years as a transport writer, I have covered numerous attempts by entrepreneurs and idealists to make use of the canal network, that wonderful precursor of the railways, as a transport system. They always seem to come to naught even though many canals on the Continent have retained substantial commercial traffic because of bureaucratic barriers and entrenched attitudes. Inland waterways are perfect for low value slow transport such as refuse. ...

After the latest huge premium-payment deal is signed, it’s time for the ORR to bring transparency to the opaque finances of franchising, contends CHRISTIAN WOLMAR. THE South West Trains franchise awarded to Stagecoach at the end of last month gives us a pretty good picture of what the Department for Transport likes to see from its bidders, but it still fails to answer that perennial question asked in this column: ‘What ...

It is remarkable how little evaluation of road schemes is carried out once the shiny new tarmac has been laid. These roads are always built on a wave of optimism, backed by 'business cases' and detailed consultants' reports which appear ever so convincing at the time but little independent assessment ex post facto ever emerges. Or even when the work is undertaken, the study dribbles out without any publicity. The Highways ...