Christian Wolmar

The publication of the government’s response to the consultation process for HS2 should have marked a key point in the progress of the plan. It should have been the point at which everyone recognised that, come what may, the scheme was going ahead,  the time when the  Nimbys decide to channel their efforts on maximising their compensation rather than stopping the scheme and when a confident minister proclaims that HS2 ...

Looking at Monday's Panorama programme again was a dispiriting experience. It had all the faults of modern TV documentaries with much emphasis on personal stories and nice pictures but very little substance. The message was incredibly muddled and anyone not versed in the issues would have struggled to understand what on earth was going on. It failed to explain propely the background, merely allowing numerous passengers to moan rather, as ...

They were talking about Boris Island on Radio 5 the other day. We’ve already got Boris bikes, the tortuously alliterative alternative to Barclays Bikes, which presumably the sponsor had hoped would be common parlance, and even Boris buses, the replacement for Routemasters that will supposedly bring back conductors, but Boris Island? That really does seem a little over the top. After all, it is, in fact a plan for an ...

The plan to build a high speed rail network across Britain is the largest ever single infrastructure project this country has ever seen. In cost terms, at £32.7bn, it dwarfs predecessors such as the Channel Tunnel or the Olympics and is on the scale of, say, the Pyramids or the Panama Canal. While it is, therefore, hardly surprising that the project generates considerable controversy, it is astonishing that the basis ...

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of the railways in creating the Britain we know today. Before their invention, travel was a slow and arduous business and few people ventured very far from their homes. Once the railway age began, with the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester railway in 1830, people’s horizons opened up and travel soon became commonplace, even for the relatively poor. The railways ushered ...

: Robert Horton played a crucial and controversial role in the privatisation of Britain’s railways in the mid 1990s and can be characterised to some extent as the villain of the piece. The largely ‘back of an envelope’ privatisation scheme put forward hastily by the Tories after their surprise 1992 election victory envisaged Railtrack, responsible for the track and infrastructure of the railways, remaining in public ownership at least until ...