Rail 941: The damaging war between London and the government
I love London, my home town and one of the great cities of the world. It is a much kinder ...
The strange obsession with innovation
By Pearl Ahrens and Christian Wolmar Innovation has become something of a buzzword in recent years. From Uber to Deliveroo, ...
The fundamental contradiction of mobility
The fascinating paradox about transport is the contradiction between accessibility and mobility. We all want to have access to the ...
Rail 940: Does HS2 fit with the decarbonising agenda?
The government’s decarbonisation policy document is a constipated effort, blood out of stone from reluctant politicians after much delay. It ...
Rail 939: Crossrail’s long journey is almost over
It’s gone quiet on Crossrail recently, and they like it like that. No news is good news because the past ...
September 2021 newsletter: a (sort of) return to normal
Life is returning to around 50 per cent normal, so this newsletter is focussing on various events I am speaking ...
Rail 938: The unanswered questions over the Croydon tram disaster
For more than a century and a half, rail safety has improved thanks to learning from the causes of past ...
August newsletter: The driverless car conundrum solved
I have finally resolved a conundrum that has been bugging me for several years. Despite writing numerous articles and two ...
Rail 937: New station, old timetable
There seems to be a bit of a pattern to my summer writings in my attempt to keep away from ...
Rail 936: Louth, a gem hidden from the railway
I know I really ought to write about all the very important things going on in the railway. There’s no ...
Letter to the Financial Times: No such thing as a half driverless car
Patrick Magee (Has big tech backfired on robotaxis?, July 20) has missed the key point about relying on driver aids ...
Rail 935: Can Network Rail be tamed?
The story of the next couple of years in the rail industry will be how to tame the elephant in ...
Rail 934: A bridge over troubled concrete
Over the years, as a journalist, I have occasionally come across stories that simply do not make sense. Brexit is ...
Rail 933: 10 questions about Williams Shapps report
There is no doubt that the Williams Shapps report could have been a lot worse. There is undoubtedly a strong ...
Letter to the Guardian: active oldies
My very smug letter to the Guardian in response to one accusing us oldies of sitting on our butts all ...
Rail 932: Great? New plan for railways falls short
If you want to understand the intentions behind the Government’s White Paper heralding the arrival of Great British Railways, look ...
The Great British Railway is a fudge riding for a fail
We all knew it was a mistake and we told them so. When the Tory government pushed through the privatisation ...
Rail 931: British government should participate in the Eurostar rescue
When people suggest to me that it would be best if politics were left out of the railways, I always ...
Railcard scam is nothing short of theft by the state
Last week, buying a ticket for my first rail journey in six months, I said to the kindly ticket clerk, ...
Letter to The Times: Lack of resilience of today’s railway
Sir. The collapse of the train services out of King’s Cross and Paddington after the announcement that the Hitachi trains ...
