Christian Wolmar

Gordon Brown has been largely silent on transport and therefore it is very difficult to assess what he is likely to do once the shortest house move in history has been completed. Brown’s main achievement – if that’s what you can call it – was to encourage his special adviser, Shriti Vadera, to push through the hugely expensive and cumbersome Public Private Partnership for the London Underground. In return, he did ...

This is one of those weeks when I wish I had three or four times as much space, as so much is happening on the railway with many fascinating implications and we are coming up to a crucial period which will determine the industry’s future for a decade or more. There were two real biggies: the announcement of the 1,000 extra carriages for the network by Douglas Alexander, the Transport ...

The plan to introduce a thousand extra carriages on the railway announced recently by Douglas Alexander, the transport secretary, highlights the major problem now facing the railway: trains are becoming too popular. Until recently that had been reliability. The chaos caused by the aftermath of the Hatfield train crash in October 2000 lasted for several years, resulting in more than a doubling of delays on the network. Passengers became ...

The Channel Tunnel is a sadly wasted asset. Far from being a vital transport link with Europe, its relative unimportance as part of the transport structure is a sad testimony to its failure to live up to its promise. Every time that the financial crisis which has dogged the project since its inception, the question of its closure is raised. French shareholders are about to decide whether to vote ...

The long term consequences of the Grayrigg train derailment will not be as serious as those of previous rail crashes like Ladbroke Grove and Hatfield but that does not mean either that they will be trifling or that they should be ignored. There are several reasons why the rail industry has come out relatively well out of the accident, even when the shocking state of the points that caused the derailment ...

The 1.8 million signatures on the recent road pricing petition is the least of the problems facing supporters of the concept. The plan to introduce a workable pay-as-you-drive scheme is pitted with so many potholes that it is difficult to see how politicians will ever manage to drive it through and implement anything like a comprehensive national system. And I say "a" rather than "the" system, because there is no model, ...