Christian Wolmar

The Australian addiction to the car has very deep roots. I am reading an absolutely fabulous novel about Melbourne between the wars, My Brother Jack, in which the father of the two main protagonists, who is a foreman in a tram shed, buys his first car, a Chevrolet in 1926. That seems amazing, It seems to suggests that car use and ownership in Oz percolated down to the blue collar ...

After the spartan and drab train between Sydney and Newcastle, which technically is a local Sydney service, I took the CountryLink train to Canberra, a much more pleasant experience, though one which highlights the lack of vision which characterises Australian passenger rail services. With sun shining after three days of rain, the views of the bush and the forest are pleasant. The scenery is unspectacular but gives that feeling of vastness ...

The Association of Train Operating Companies celebrated the opening of a new station in London, Mitcham Eastfields by issuing a press release pointing out that this was the 50th station reopening over the past decade – in other words since privatisation. While that is, of course, a cause for celebration, the number of reopenings in the past decade is not so much a tribute to the dynamism and entrepreneurship of the ...

Just a quick few thoughts about Australian trains. Most of the rail industry is , of course, geared towards freight traffic with massive flows on certain routes, and passenger trains are usually an afterthought, except in suburban areas, generally used by relatively poor people or not at all. The fares are incredibly cheap and pensioners in New South Wales, can go virtually anywhere in the state for a flat fare ...

Fire & Steam: a new history of the railways in Britain, Christian Wolmar. Atlantic Books, London (2007). 384pp., £19.99, ISBN: 978 1843546290 With Fire & Steam Christian Wolmar has augmented his previous rail-related work in much the same way as The Subterranean Railway (Wolmar, 2006) added to his earlier ...

Nothing is stranger than arriving in Australia after 20 hours in an aeroplane. It was already dark, a whole day of my life gone without ever seeing the sunlight except through the window of a plane and, ever so briefly, through the glass at Singapore airport. And the glow of the sun is in the wrong place, in the north west, somewhere where the sun never shines in the UK. And ...