Christian Wolmar

London is a booming city and it’s going to get better. Successive governments have been accused of channelling railway investment into the capital and there’s no doubt that this is the case. Just look at how the railway scene in London will change by the end of the decade. The expanded Thameslink will allow up to 20 trains (24 theoretically) per hour through the capital, linking a whole host of new ...

In his George Bradshaw lecture given at the Institution of Civil Engineers in October, Tim O’Toole, the boss of FirstGroup emphasised that the key reason behind the growth of the railways in the past 15 years was the fact that they were in the private sector. Moreover, he argued that it was the very complexity of the railways created by privatisation that has delivered that growth and therefore, the fragmentation ...

The West Coast fiasco would have been rejected as a script for the political satire show, The Thick of it as too outlandish. Never in my years of criticising the franchising system and asking the question ‘what is franchising for?’ would I have dreamt that it could get this bad. To argue, as some in the industry suggest, that this is just a temporary blip in the wonderfully successful history of ...

There is much cause to celebrate in the rail industry. The Olympics were an amazing triumph for public transport and the rail industry in particular. They were advertised as the public transport games and that is exactly what they turned out to be. Fears about transport chaos, got up by the media, proved to be groundless (as I had predicted). There is a wider message to be drawn from this. Public ...

Everyone knows that the fares system is a complete mess. No other product has such a complex pricing structure. Nor indeed, does any other railway in the world have such a maze of fares. The reason for the complexity is, of course, buried in history and, oddly, has been made worse by the use of new technology. British Rail had a relatively simple set of fares though it began to offer ...

The government’s Command Paper, Reforming our Railways: Putting the Customer First, which was finally published in early March, was expected to provide answers to a number of issues facing the rail industry. The lengthy delay to is publication only served to raise the level of anticipation further since the railways have been clouded in an aura of uncertainty since the process to examine the high cost of the industry was ...