Christian Wolmar

British governments have never understood the value of railways to society. The gist of yesterday's White Paper is that passengers, rather than taxpayers, will have to pay for any improvements to the system. The ratio is about half and half, but by 2014, the Government expects the passengers to contribute three-quarters of the cost of running the railways. Superficially, this appears logical. In response this week to complaints about rising fares from ...

I have been extremely busy with Metronet collapse and other writing, so have failed to blog for a few days but a quote in today's Guardian forces me into the ether. In a piece about rising fares, a Department for Transport spokesbeing defends the government's policy of encouraging above inflation rises by saying: 'The reality is that 6 per cent of the population travels on railways. Why should peopole who ...

First Great Western’s problems have more to do with the structure of the group and the financial pressures it faces than the size of the franchise, argues CHRISTIAN WOLMAR. LONDON TravelWatch, has called for the termination of the First Great Western franchise because of its continuing poor performance. While we are used to Bob Crow and his politically motivated pals regularly calling for all ‘privateers’ to be consigned to oblivion, such ...

Even by the standards of Britain's many rail fiascos, the implosion of Tube contractor Metronet is spectacular. Metronet announced this morning that it will go into adminstration, relinquishing contracts to refurbish two-thirds of the Tube network. Having overspent by perhaps £1 billion on each of its two Tube contracts, it tried to claw back the money from Transport for London. But yesterday's decision by the Public Private Partnership arbiter made ...

It is not often that journalists can claim that they were 100 per cent right, but the imminent collapse of the Metronet contract for maintaining and refurbishing two thirds of the London Underground shows that my longstanding doubts about this sort of contract were well founded. The problem with the London Underground PPP is that it was simply attempting the impossible. Not only did it try to set out the work ...

I have just spent a couple of days in Aylesbury, one of the Cycling Demonstration Towns sponsored by Cycling England on whose board I sit. We had a very pleasant welcome and the presentation by the council officers working on the scheme was excellent. They proudly pointed to the fact that there had been a tripling in the number of people cycling regularly to work, though this was from a ...