Christian Wolmar

The manner of Ruth Kelly's departure has caused far more political fall-out than the actual fact of her resignation. I was at the Labour party conference, and indeed bumped into Tom Harris the junior transport minister at 11pm that night, and blissfully went to bed with absolutely no knowledge about the momentous events taking place in the bars of the Midland hotel. I was then berated by my friends for ...

Several times over the past couple of weeks, a helicopter dragging an ad for cheap flights from Qantas has disturbed the peace of North London. The helicopter goes particularly slowly as it seems to struggle to pull the huge banner across the sky and, since it is flying low, the noise lasts for far longer than a normal flight. My daughter's dog is terrified by it and tends to rush ...

It is some time since I posed the Wolmar Question, ‘what is franchising for?’ but recent events suggest the time is ripe for the question to be posed again. First there was the Compeition Commission report into train leasing which backfired badly on the Department for Transport which initiated it and then there was the revelation of the incredibly complex arrangements First Capital Connect and Southeastern over new trains and ...

A simple but fantastic idea was put forward at a conference I was chairing last week. A councillor from Weymouth suggested that there should be a car exclusion zone around schools, forcing people to walk the last 5-10 minutes to school. That would make taking kids to school by car especially for primary schools pointless. Of course there are lots of practical difficulties. You can just hear the parents saying that ...

The BBC is featuring a Beeching season this autumn, with a whole host of programmes kicked off by an assessment of the railway enthusiasts’ hate figure by Private Eye editor Ian Hislop. There are also a series of regional programmes looking at the effects of the closures in every part of the country. A reassessment of Beeching it timely. It is all too easy to jump on the Beeching as anti-christ ...

Bit ironic that my last blog but one comments on the sometimes poor service operated by Eurostar. Certainly the company does not seem to have very good contingency plans given widespread criticism from stranded passengers. They have a case. Why, for example, can it not simply run a fleet of coaches to take people to Calais via a ferry and from there to Paris by train, or even arrange for ...