Christian Wolmar

Futurology is a dodgy business, but there is no better time than the beginning of a New Year to try a bit of crystal ball gazing on a rather longer time scale than Mystic Wolmar’s usual efforts. The announcement of the route for High Speed 2 raises the question of what the railway might look like in 20 or 30 years time and clearly the answer depends very much on ...

The sudden abandonment of the Wrexham & Shropshire train service, started less than three years ago, is another nail in the coffin for the idea that open access has any relevance to today's rail network. It leaves just Grand Central and Hull Trains, both on the East Coast and little likelihood of any new arrivals in the near future. Wrexham & Shropshire was a great little service, a kind of throwback to ...

At a very interesting meeting yesterday on crisis management hosted by the Independent Transport Commission, it became obvious that so much of the response to emergencies is  about information. And yet many transport organisations are  nowhere near understanding this or upgrading their procedures to ensure they can get information out. During the recent 'snow event', the best train company was London Midland which had a very active Twitter service, sending out ...

It is easy to make heroic statements at the beginning of a new year about this being a momentous time and an exceptional period ahead, with the expectation that by the end of the year these predictions will all be forgotten. However, this time, it really is true. The year 2011 is bound to down as an epoch-making one, with probably the most radical changes to the structure of ...

  The idea of driverless trains any time in the near future is a ridiculous fantasy and Boris’s musings about them are mere political braggadacio. Sure, as Boris said,the Central and the Victoria lines, and part of the Jubilee are operated automatically, but that’s because the signalling equipment is completely different from those on the other lines.To fit the rest of the Tube network with automatic train control systems would take ...

I have done a couple of  TV interviews on the steep rail fare rises today and it is striking that the mood out there is very angry. The fares regulation rules were designed to protect people who had no choice other than to use the railways, notably south east commuters, and it is they who are hardest hit. Having 12 per cent slapped on the price of your ticket, as has been ...