Christian Wolmar

On the scale of damning, the NAO report into HS2 is around 9 out of 10. Remember this is an organisation that pulls its punches, showing draft reports to ministers and generally avoids rocking the boat too hard, though it has improved since the disgraceful reign of Sir John Bourn who was keener on eating fat dinners with subjects of the report rather than investigating them. The report published today, ...

The confirmation that HS2 will need a paving bill in order to be able to obtain funds for continued preparatory work shows just how early in the whole process we still are. First the needs to go through, but then there is the much more complex process of the hybrid bill which will take 18 months or so to get through Parliament. It is rather odd that the government and HS2 ...

The Department for Transport bombarded me with several copies of the press release on franchising but that did not make its contents any more coherent.Essentially, apart from speeding up the process on the successful publicly owned East Coast, the whole franchise programme has been delayed, with temporary extensions to most franchises.  The most extraordinary bit about this abject failure is the statement that ' in order to roll out the programme ...

There is a big game of bluff going on. The fact that all four bidders in the collapsed Great Western franchise have filed a court case to try to reclaim the money lost in the bidding process does not mean they want to go to court. Quite the opposite. They are merely putting pressure on the  Department to cough up. However, as often is the case with railway companies, they fail ...

One of the stupidest things that TOCs are doing is charging for internet use. That's rather like asking for money for the lighting or the toilet. They should, instead, be looking at the competition. The car manufacturers are turning their product into mobile communication zones that have instant access to the internet and easy hands free mobile phone use. Quite apart from the fact that this poses a danger to other ...

I know this is slightly a hardy perennial, but last night's trip to Ashford International and back was the pits in terms of the number and vacuousness of the announcements. Both trains were late, and that did not help, but on the outward one, there really were about a dozen in the first 20 minutes, and even when a measure of peace had been obtained as the station had been ...