Christian Wolmar

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 lines were closed, along with part of the District line. Already this month we have ...

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 redolent of the past, somewhere in the 1970s when miners forced three day weeks and ...

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 transport. From the opening of ...

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 his four year tenure in the job, having been put there for precisely that purposes ...

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. Political accident- proneness goes along with the job description. So it says something about ...

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 to improve the ageing infrastructure. Most excitingly of all Britain is about to complete its ...