Christian Wolmar

The Channel Tunnel – thank God the use of that awful conflation Chunnel never took off – is now in its mid teens and yet is a remarkably underused asset. Sure, there are a couple of Eurostar trains every hour and a full complement of Shuttle trains but that does not even add up to half the tunnel’s potential capacity of 20 trains per hour. There is just a handful ...

My oft-repeated question of ‘what is franchising for?’ will need to be answered by the new government as it faces a tricky situation in relation to train operators. On the one hand, both parties in the coalition support the notion of longer franchises, with more investment coming from operators, but, on the other, the financial constraints caused by the budget deficit mean that there will be pressure from the Treasury ...

  So Philip Hammond is the poor sap who drew the short straw as transport secretary in the new government, having missed out on the chief secretary to the Treasury job – presumably twice – which he shadowed because it was allocated to a Libdem. It is rather ominous that he put reviewing spending as the first of the tasks he has been allocated but hardly surprising.  We all know that the ...

I have just spent a couple of days in Bristol with the Cycling England board to see how they are progressing with their Cycling city project.  It was highly instructive, highlighting both the considerable progress that was being made but also the difficulties. By all accounts, the project, which is now into its third year, was slow to get off the ground but is progressing well.  New infrastructure is popping up, ...

Who would ever have guessed that we are where we are with a ConLib coalition that includes a Libdem junior transport minister and a mishmash of the two parties’ policies and is confidently expecting to still be here in 2015? It would have taken Mystic Wolmar to have peered into quite a few crystal balls to come up with that scenario and there is still an air of disbelief in ...

The kernel of a Con-Dem policy on railways is beginning to emerge with various announcements by the transport secretary Philip Hammond, who shows every sign of being a roads man, and it's not looking good for rail passengers. In headline terms, it's higher fares, more overcrowding, fewer new coaches, cutbacks to projected schemes but let's press on with ...