Christian Wolmar

When it was decided to set up an enquiry on the scandal over the suicide of the scientist, David Kelly, in 2003, I happened to be on holiday near where a couple of members of the Labour government were staying. When the name of Lord Hutton, the judge appointed to hold the enquiry emerged in the conversation around the pool, the ministers smiled benignly:  ‘He’s a great appointment’, one of ...

The London Underground is unique. That is not just because it was the world’s first subterranean railway, built more than 30 years ahead of any other. Nor is it because the system is the largest or the most heavily used, which actually is no longer the case. No, the reason that the London Underground is different from any other subway system is that it has become the very emblem of ...

It is time that the train companies took on board the fact that they are, for better or worse, in the private sector. The irony is that in many respects they behave like the old state company which they replaced, and use the rules devised to protect British Rail to their advantage. A reader, Paul Davies wrote to me recently about his son, Alex, who was not a frequent rail user. ...

It is time to play the blame game on the West Coast franchise fiasco. The guilty parties should not be allowed to get away with it, especially as they are largely politicians, rather than the civil servants who have been made to take the can quite unfairly. I start with Alastair Darling, aided and abetted by that squabbling duo, Richard Bowker and Tom Winsor who were respectively boss of the Strategic ...

Having just spent three weeks in Russia trundling along the Transsiberian, it is impossible not to devote a column to it with the aim of persuading any rail enthusiast to do it once in a lifetime. Sure, everyone who has come back from it moans about the endless stretches where only the odd fallen down birch tree breaks up the monotony of forest and brown grassland steppe. And travelling in ...

It is time for a rethink in the way that the railway’s economics are presented and analysed. The railways suffer from the perception that they require vast amounts of subsidy and yet the way that the information is presented is a crude oversimplication, failing to consider various aspects of railway economics and crucially missing out a fundamental figure – the railways’ contribution to the exchequer – which greatly reduces the ...