Christian Wolmar

My alter ego, Mystic Wolmar, sometimes gets predictions so wrong that I have contemplated smashing his crystal once and for all. But just occasionally he hits the mark as sweetly as a Gareth Bale piledriver. So allow him, for once, a little bit of glory. When the Department for Transport published its franchise plans, Mystic was quoted in The Sun (I know, but they did ask…) saying ‘I suspect they ...

The announcement restarting the franchise process - for the second time – after the West Coast omnishambles put the spotlight yet again on the system but readers will be relieved to know that I will refrain from rehearsing, yet again,  the arguments over the UK rail structure which I have discussed many times before. Instead, I will try to place the context in the debate currently raging fiercely in Europe ...

The Department for Transport bombarded me with several copies of the press release on franchising but that did not make its contents any more coherent.Essentially, apart from speeding up the process on the successful publicly owned East Coast, the whole franchise programme has been delayed, with temporary extensions to most franchises.  The most extraordinary bit about this abject failure is the statement that ' in order to roll out the programme ...

It’s fortunate that Patrick McLoughlin appears utterly unflappable because there has been an awful lot to flap about in the Department of Transport since he took over as Transport Secretary in the autumn reshuffle. If he expected a quiet time after seven years in the Westminster maelstrom as the Tories’ chief whip, he was sorely mistaken. Within days of taking office, he found himself having to deal with the West Coast ...

Dear Richard Brown, You have the unenviable task of trying to sort out the franchising issue and make sense of system that simply is not sensible. Your remit is pretty limited, though apparently it may change when the first review, into the specifics of the West Coast omnishambles by Sam Laidlaw is completed but I suspect – nay I know – that the thorough root and branch reform of the system ...

Talking to railway managers about the West Coast debacle, time and again they came out with the same refrain, words to the effect that this is the biggest cock-up on the railways that they could remember. The words, of course, were not always so polite but there was a unified sense that his was a train crash without victims, except the taxpayer of course, that would have long term repercussions ...