Rail 880: HS2 at risk from the Tory hordes
There is one policy that seems to unite more of the Tory party candidates than anything else. Scrapping HS2 gets ...
Rail 879: The Crossrail mystery – what went wrong?
Wherever you look in the rail industry, there seems to be trouble ahead . I do not want to be ...
Rail 878: Obsession with competition is a waste of effort
It’s fantasy time in the rail industry. Keith Williams made the mistake of asking for submissions from all and sundry ...
Letter to The Times: Extinction Rebellion demonstrates the benefits of pedestrianisation
There has been much debate about the rights and wrongs of the Extinction Rebellion demonstrations but Londoners seem united on ...
Rail 877: Pensions confusion spells death of franchising
With the franchising system already reeling from a series of setbacks, somehow the Department for Transport and a couple of ...
My (short) letter to The Times on franchising
The row over pension funding highlights the impossibility of transferring real risks to the private sector. For its shareholders’ benefit, ...
Rail 876: The long slow death of franchises
The death throes of franchising are not a pretty sight. That the present model is dead was effectively confirmed by ...
Rail 875: Electric is the buzz word
Of all the stupid decisions that successive governments have made about the railways over the past quarter of a century, ...
Rail 874: Goblin gobbled up
It seemed such a simple job. The Barking – Gospel Oak line was becoming so heavily used both by passengers ...
Rail 873: A small step towards sorting out the fares
It is one of the great ironies of rail privatisation that it was supposed to free up the private sector ...
Book review: Monisha Rajesh, Around the world in 80 trains
Monisha Rajesh wrote lovingly about the Indian railways in her previous book but this set her wondering whether the train ...
Rail 872: The North needs rail investment
One of the few (only?) good ideas from George Osborne when he was Chancellor was the concept of a Northern ...
Driverless cars and dead bodies
Technology is the new religion. Because of the transformation from an analog to a digital world in the past half ...
Letter to The Times on Driverless cars
It is unclear where the push for driverless cars (News, Feb 6) is coming from. There is no public desire: ...
Rail 871: The Crossrail mystery – and how the USA does not understand rail
The awful year in 2018 endured by the railways might have been leavened somewhat had Crossrail opened on time. In ...
India’s love hate relationship with the railways
Nowhere other than India is the railway so indelibly connected with the image of the nation. Just as there is ...
EU membership does not preclude rail renationalisation
[From Open Democracy, December 2017] Of the Tory privatisations visited upon the UK in recent decades, few arouse such intensity ...
Rail 870: My letter to Keith Williams on what Rail Review should examine
Dear Keith, I wish you lots of luck in your endeavour to sort out Britain’s railways. There will be many ...
