Christian Wolmar

It’s that time of year folks, when the railway school headmaster sends out his end of year report to all those fee-paying parents (and boy, they are paying lots more this year!) and misbehaving children. And eventful it has been, with plenty to report, lots of changes, an accident, a financial collapse and, of course, all those promises to do better in the next 30 years. Let’s start with Network Rail class which, in ...

Good piece in The Guardian today about the government’s policy on the environment. Ashley Seager points out just how slowly the politicians are responding to the crisis of climate change. He points out that the widening of a stretch of the M6 will cost £3bn, whereas that is 40 times what the government is spending on its low-carbon buildings programme aimed at boosting the take up of renewable energies. Seager focuses ...

Ruth Kelly will not thank her two predecessors, Douglas Alexander and Alistair Darling, for dumping her with the enquiry currently being undertaken by the Competition Commission into the rolling stock market. This was stimulated by repeated protests by the Department for Transport, which ultimately foots the bill for much of the cost of leasing trains, that the three rolling stock companies (roscos) were overcharging the train operators to the tune of ...

The long slow death of Metronet had an air of inevitability ever since the arbiter, Chris Bolt, announced late last year that the company was spending more money than expected and that some of this might not be ‘economic and efficient’. It was Bolt who ensured that the company was finally put out of its misery when, on July 16th, he announced in an interim finding that only £121m out ...

Pity the poor rail passenger. The big idea behind the Rail White Paper was not a major new high speed line, electrification or even a series of major enhancements. It is, instead, that passengers will bear the burden of any investment which the industry needs to meet the expected growth. All was made clear just a couple of days before the publication of the Paper in a quote in a Guardian ...

To call the White Paper on railways disappointing would be rather like saying that the Hatfield train crash was a slight mishap for the industry. The dirty hands of the Treasury eagerly cutting back on anything exciting or hopeful in the strategy are all too clear. Virtually all substantial enhancements has been taken out, leaving a handful of schemes that are the basic minimum for the government’s fig leaf of ...