Christian Wolmar

Immortalised in film and fiction, the ‘Orient Express’ is now a pale shadow of what it was - and CHRISTIAN WOLMAR believes it will get worse as more high-speed lines open across Europe. THE ‘Orient Express’ is not what it used to be. The train that originally connected Paris via Vienna and Budapest with the Black Sea and Istanbul (or Constantinople as it was then known) first ran in 1883 and ...

There is an eerie symmetry between Friday’s train accident and the similar crash at Potters Bar five years ago. Attention very quickly focussed yesterday on a set of points used to connect the south and north bound lines and similar pointswork was the cause of the Potters Bar disaster. At Potters Bar part of a set of points broke underneath a train, causing it to derail, also at around 100 mph. ...

The railway industry generally gets a much worse press than it deserves. Despite the fact that even at the worst of times, over 80 per cent of trains get there on time and that it is by far the safest form of transport, the brickbats never stop flying. So normally once there is an accident, the brickbats start flying. This time, however, it was different. In the immediate aftermath of the ...

The EU stresses the importance of rail integration in the face of competition - yet is increasingly fragmenting Europe’s railways. CHRISTIAN WOLMAR highlights a bizarre contradiction. OVER the past couple of weeks I have travelled to Paris and Brussels for rail conferences and also been editing a couple of documents produced by international organisations for dissemination across the European Union. The theme that emerges from these documents and from various conversations with ...

The rail companies may be forced into offering a new excuse for why people cannot get on their intended train: the wrong sort of rail industry structure’. This is because there is a fantastic three way kafuffle going on between the Department for Transport, the rolling stock company Angel and Virgin trains which is a result of a combination of the law of unintended consequences with the complex nature of ...

The chaotic scenes and the passengers’ strike on the trains in the West Country have highlighted fault lines in the structure of the railways which will haunt rail ministers throughout this crucial year for the industry. The new franchise which started in April last year was based on a bid that can only continue to deliver profits for First Great Western with both high fares rises and costs cutting. So fares ...