Christian Wolmar

Having been rapped on the knuckles in my one ever (short) conversation with Justine Greening, I take some pleasure from the fact that she has had the same treatment meted out to her by the normally supine ATOC. My verbal bashing as I have reported before, came at the press conference to launch the government's long awaited Command Paper. I had the temerity to suggest that Paper did not seem to ...

I had expected better. Justine Greening, the transport secretary, is clearly a sharp cookie and has picked up her brief assiduously and rapidly. However, in publishing the long-awaited Command Paper, Putting the customer first, she has clearly allowed the civil servants free rein to produce a document as anodyne as a MacDonald’s hamburger without relish. Any hard decisions have been postponed until later in the year when we hear what ...

Justine Greening's idea of going along to the Network Rail members meeting to cast her vote against the bosses' bonuses exposes the ridiculous nature of the structure of the industry. Here is the person representing the interests of the government, which puts £4bn subsidy into the industry, casting her vote which has the same weight as Les from Dorking and Doris from Droitwich who happen to be members because they ...

The publication of the government’s response to the consultation process for HS2 should have marked a key point in the progress of the plan. It should have been the point at which everyone recognised that, come what may, the scheme was going ahead,  the time when the  Nimbys decide to channel their efforts on maximising their compensation rather than stopping the scheme and when a confident minister proclaims that HS2 ...

At the beginning of 2011 I wrote that it would be a momentous year. I’m not sure that it has actually quite lived up to that billing. Although there’s been no shortage of drama and excitement, the weakness of the McNulty report, hijacked by a minister who delved deep into the detail of what interested him – and railway finances certainly did – means that in essence it is ‘steady ...

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 ...