Christian Wolmar

This was supposed to be an interview with Theresa Villiers, the little known shadow transport spokeswoman but she proved to be an elusive character. After a dozen phone calls to her office which were answered by people called Giles and Phillipa who all seemed incapable of returning calls, the New Statesman was snubbed as, apparently Ms Villiers was not available for interview, as clearly she wants to remain an unknown ...

Review by Andrew Adonis Published: October 4 2009 21:17 | Last updated: October 4 2009 21:17 Blood, Iron & Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World By Christian Wolmar Atlantic Books £25 High-speed rail, largely the preserve of Japan and France until the 1990s, is sweeping across Europe and Asia. China's network will be nearly as large as the rest of the world's put together when the 1,300km Beijing to Shanghai line is completed in ...

The struggles in Manchester over the congestion charge plan highlight the difficulties faced by politicians when trying to convince people of what is in their long term interest, when faced with emotional and misleading opposition. Simplistic narrow arguments about taxation and fleecing the motorist mean that taking rational long term policies that would undoubtedly be of benefit to wider society are impossible to implement With £3bn of transport improvements on offer ...

The real cost of the destruction of British Rail, initiated by John Major's government 15 years ago, is finally emerging. Both aspects of the double whammy suffered by passengers after Christmas - the engineering overruns and the fare rises above inflation - can be traced to that piece of mindless vandalism that Labour has done so little to repair. A privatised railway suffers such severe engineering overruns because more work is ...

If there were ever a poisoned chalice in government, it must be the portfolio as minister in charge of the railways. Even for people who don’t travel by train, the railways are a national obsession and make the headlines quite disproportionately to the number of people who use them. Political accident- proneness goes along with the job description. So it says something about ...

The railways are booming. More people are using them than at any time in their history and the huge growth, which has seen a 50 per cent rise in the past dozen years, shows no sign of abating. Massive amounts of taxpayers’ money are being poured into Network Rail to improve the ageing infrastructure. Most excitingly of all Britain is about to complete its ...