When Ken Livingstone signed a three-year pay deal with the rail unions in February, Londoners breathed a sigh of relief, hoping that strikes on the Underground would be a thing of the past.
But yesterday life was back to normal, with a dispute over “safety” paralysing large sections of the system.
The Circle and Hammersmith and City [...]
Archive of September, 2007
Industrial relations on the railways have soured noticeably with strikes on the London Underground, and ‘One’, as well as several ongoing disputes. There seems to be a new militancy afoot and indeed there is evidence of a parallel universe in the emails that pop up in my inbox almost every day. It describes a Britain [...]
You don’t have to be an “anorak” to appreciate Christian Wolmar’s new history of the railways in Britain.
In fact, this breathtaking tour-de-force study of a revolutionary transport system that transformed the social, cultural and economic base of society is written for a general audience and comes from the pen of Britain’s foremost expert on public [...]
I can’t resist another quick ‘I told you so’. Alistair Darling was a terrible Transport Secretary and I always thought that he did not have the brains or the nous to be Chancellor, a job for which he was always earmarked by Gordon Brown.
Sure, he kept the Department for Transport out of the headlines during [...]
If there were ever a poisoned chalice in government, it must be the portfolio as minister in charge of the railways. Even for people who don’t travel by train, the railways are a national obsession and make the headlines quite disproportionately to the number of people who use them. [...]
The railways are booming. More people are using them than at any time in their history and the huge growth, which has seen a 50 per cent rise in the past dozen years, shows no sign of abating. Massive amounts of taxpayers’ money are being poured into Network Rail [...]