Christian Wolmar

The coordination to get a rail service between the two halves of Workington cut off by the flood has been a tribute to the rail industry. Given that it involved Network Rail building a new station and Northern having to provide extra train services, the speed with which it has been carried through is nothing short of miraculous. The fact that the service is free makes it even better. It would ...

This weekend, I visited a friend of mine up North who has a house she is building in Sheffield. It is just the sort of infill that helps makes cities more dense, a spare plot in an already built up area that is served by public transport. So far so good. But then she told me that in order to get planning permission, the house had to have off street parking ...

The ever busy Lord Adonis launched his stations initiative with yet another tour of the country. It all came about because of his experience with his previous tour at Easter when he could not get a cup of tea at Southampton station in the evening. It is all a clever bit of politics. He may be in the Lords and fooled one BBC interviewer I talked with yesterday into thinking he ...

Rail 630   The Tories are preparing for government. Or at least they should be. Mystic Wolmar's view is still that there will be a hung Parliament after the election but the likelihood is that even should the Conservatives fail to win the election outright, there will be a Tory Secretary of State for Transport by the second week of May next year.  So far, the Tories have told us little of what ...

  The first time I voted in an election was at the GLC elections of 1973 when Labour promised to scrap the ring road schemes that would have turned the centre of London into a bigger version of Birmingham's bull ring. Labour won and we were left with the Westway over Ladbroke Grove to show what we so narrowly escaped from. There cannot be many people, even the motoring lobby, who ...

  There is no doubt that the BTP was transformed under Ian Johnston's tenure. It had been a real backwater of policing, earning little respect within the rail industry and none outside it. Now it is seen as a modern police force and its strength is shown by the fact that it survived a series of reviews by various parts of the government - at one time it seemed like an ...