Christian Wolmar

Eurostar has always been a creature of government. All the major decisions determining its service have been made by government or state-owned railways but now the company is determined to establish itself in its own right. To do that would, ultimately, require Eurostar to be entirely freestanding and, obviously, to make a profit so that it would not be dependent on government handouts.  The first step towards this was Eurostar’s establishment, ...

After the Xmas Eurostar debacle, the company repeatedly said that it would improve its website in future to communicate better with its passengers and respond better to crisis. Fat chance. On the website today, there is a mere two paragraph warning telling people not to come to the stations without a ticket but there is no mention of any extra trains or anything that is being done to accommodate displaced ...

It could have been a lot worse for the 152 passengers and crew when ice led to an engine failure. Indeed, they were lucky to escape alive but strangely the media coverage of the report into the incident was relatively muted - a few interviews with the heroic crew and a bit of technical explanation, but with only very minor injuries and no dead, the matter was soon forgotten.  That, of ...

The independent report on the Eurostar pre xmas breakdown is being released on friday with a press conference - itself a rarity these days in the rail industry - and hopefully a full exposition of what exactly went wrong. Chris Garnett, one of the two independent authors of the report, has promised that all aspects of the fiasco will be examined but one suspects that he is too much of a ...

Eurostar has attracted a fantastic amount of criticism over the debacle in the run up to Christmas when five trains failed in quick succession in the tunnel. Now that the air has cleared somewhat, it is worth examining whether Eurostar deserves all the flak it has received   Certainly, Eurostar has done well to appoint Christopher Garnett the former boss of GNER along with a French colleague, Claude Gressier, is conducting a ...

Just been to a briefing with a very tired looking Richard Brown, the head of Eurostar, and Chris Garnett (the former boss of GNER, not Network Rail as reported in the Guardian) who is conducting, along with a French colleague, the enquiry into what happened. He is hoping to publish the report by the end of January but that is a very tight schedule given how much there is to ...