Christian Wolmar

Have arrived in the US to go on my big train trip. New York to Pittsburgh today, then Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco,LA, New Orleans, Baltimore and back to NYC. There is nowhere else in the world apart from China and Russia that you can do such a long trip in one country. People are very down on Amtrak, so it will be fascinating to see how well they deliver. And of ...

  The Hatfield train crash, whose tenth anniversary is on October 17th, and its aftermath caused one of the biggest upheavals in the history of the rail industry. It wrecked the privatisation model created by the Tories a few years previously, led to the establishment of Network Rail out of the ashes of Railtrack, and resulted in the exponential increase in costs from which the industry is still suffering.  The performance ...

There are, apparently, three people on the short list to replace Iain Coucher as chief executive of Network Rail. They may, however, all be disappointed or, at best, find themselves in a completely different job from the one carried out by the overly-acquistive Mr Coucher as it has become clear that Network Rail as currently structured is not long for this world.  Network Rail faces something between dismemberment and death. That ...

THE coalition Government is learning that being in power is a very different matter to opposition. Plans have to be properly formulated and ideas have to be more than mere musings. That's why the Conservative concept for the proposed north-south high-speed line has been changed radically from the form it took in opposition. The news that Philip Hammond, the Transport Secretary, has now agreed there should be a Y-shaped route rather ...

There is something deeply depressing about press conferences at the Office of Rail Regulation. OK, one can hardly expect them to be as exciting as watching the latest episode of Neighbours but at least one should be able to leave in a slightly more enlightened state than before. But somehow one is left feeling as empty as watching Forfar play out a goalless draw with Brechin.  The ORR is, after, all ...

Here  we go again. I'm not generally a conspiracy theorist, but the way that governments around the world deal with terrorist threat certainly suggest there is an Orwellian type conspiracy to ensure that we are all kept frightened enough not to worry about loss of our civil liberties. The latest 'alert' certainly seeems to be in that category. The American government is telling its citizens to be vigilant in places where ...