Christian Wolmar

‘The Times they are a’changin’, but no one quite knows how. The ‘Command Paper’ which was supposed to set out ministerial thinking on the structure of Network Rail and was due out before Xmas is still, at the time of writing in mid-February, weeks away according to the latest pronouncement from Justine Greening, the now not so new Transport Secretary. The delay is clearly the result of fundamental divisions within the ...

Justine Greening has kept a very low profile since being thrust unexpectedly into the transport secretary’s job in October. That’s hardly surprising given the complexity of the role and the breadth of the agenda left by her predecessor, Philip Hammond, who, despite his reputation as a ‘safe pair of hands’, ducked making many key decisions and made others for which she will not thank him. Rail tends to occupy much of ...

Train travel  is becoming more of a hassle almost daily and much of it is down to the way that the train operators delight in making life more difficult for their passengers. I was a consultant on the recent Channel 4 Dispatches documentary Train journeys from hell which was screened on March 21st but initially I was reluctant to appear on it because the title, which had been set in ...

It is easy to make heroic statements at the beginning of a new year about this being a momentous time and an exceptional period ahead, with the expectation that by the end of the year these predictions will all be forgotten. However, this time, it really is true. The year 2011 is bound to down as an epoch-making one, with probably the most radical changes to the structure of ...

  The predictions that the Comprehensive Spending Review would be a disaster for the rail industry proved unfounded.  Sure, there was some bad news. Rail fares are to go up by 3 per cent above inflation, rather than 1 per cent, but, presumably as a compromise with the Libdems, this has been postponed for a year, so will not come into effect until January 2012. Most seriously, the Department for Transport ...

  The Hatfield train crash, whose tenth anniversary is on October 17th, and its aftermath caused one of the biggest upheavals in the history of the rail industry. It wrecked the privatisation model created by the Tories a few years previously, led to the establishment of Network Rail out of the ashes of Railtrack, and resulted in the exponential increase in costs from which the industry is still suffering.  The performance ...