Christian Wolmar

I had expected better. Justine Greening, the transport secretary, is clearly a sharp cookie and has picked up her brief assiduously and rapidly. However, in publishing the long-awaited Command Paper, Putting the customer first, she has clearly allowed the civil servants free rein to produce a document as anodyne as a MacDonald’s hamburger without relish. Any hard decisions have been postponed until later in the year when we hear what ...

We need to talk about risk. That’s because the assessment and allocation of risk informs virtually every decision made in the rail industry. And the tragedy is that the politicians repeatedly fail to understand the concept and therefore as a result make decisions that are completely wrong-headed. It is the current round of franchises coming up for renewal which prompts me to write about this subject, but the Intercity Express Programme ...

In the various railway history books I have written, there is a recurring theme of the fraught relationship between government and the railways. Whether it is in America or Australia, India or Italy, there is always tension in that relationship and a lack of clarity over responsibilities. Somehow, though, in Britain, that relationship has always been even more difficult and controversial than elsewhere and that is very much in evidence ...

The Rail Delivery Group was the key pan-industry organisations spun out of last year’s McNulty report. Its members are the bosses of the train operating owning groups, together with a couple of senior representatives from Network Rail including its chief executive, Sir David Higgins, along with several other key industry personnel. Sir Roy McNulty, to his credit, attends which suggests an ongoing interest in ensuring his study is taken seriously. The ...

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 ...

The annual fares rise caused rather more uproar than usual, and remarkably led to a partial retreat by the government. This suggests that the policy of increasing them even more steeply next year may be reversible, especially now that there is a Transport Secretary who has rather more sensitive political antennae than her predecessor. The case for these rises is weak, and the line taken by the Association of Train Operating ...