Christian Wolmar

Dear Ms Greening, First off, congratulations in your rapid rise to a Cabinet level job and I hope, after reading this, you won’t be regretting your decision to accept  the post. However, I thought in a spirit of helpfulness, I would set out a few isshoos (as Tony Benn used to call them) on the railways that you will be facing over coming months. I’m sure that your civil servants will have ...

Christian Wolmar Train companies are expecting 400,000 people to travel into London by train for the Royal Wedding, far more than normal on a Bank Holiday. Many of those coming from afar will be enjoying the ride on what is rather confusingly called a High Speed Train 125 which provides the backbone of Britain’s intercity services. These diesel trains, which actually have a locomotive at both ends,  are reliable and very ...

Nothing is ever simple on the railways. In most other industries,  the requirement for new equipment, leads, in a straightforward manner, to a specification of what is needed and the placing of an order.  This never happens in the railways because technical decisions soon become embroiled in wider political issues that raise financial problems that rebound back on technical questions.  The cycle gets more and more vicious and no one, ...

I am no expert on train procurement, so I hesitate to write too much about the new deal for Hitachi trains to replace the beloved 125s but everyone I talk to seems to agree that this is a crazy plan. The idea seems to be to acquire five coach hybrid trains which have electric traction but also have a diesel engine on board for use when the trains operate in ...

Normally, when ministers ask for an independent review of a policy, they ensure that some lickspittle ex civil servant is given the task and the result is suitably safe and dull, produced to justify the intended outcome. This is not the case with the report by Sir Andrew Foster, the former head of the Audit Commission, into the Intercity Express Programme. It makes for enlightening and even entertaining reading, as Sir ...

There is something to be said for tightening our belts. Having lots of money swilling around inevitably leads to waste and the discipline of a smaller budget can often lead to better governance. This is well illustrated by the decision by Lord Adonis to postpone the Intercity Express Programme to replace the 125 HST sets. While this move has been forced on the Department for Transport by the continued banking ...