Christian Wolmar

This week has seen the Mayor once again pushing one of his big ideas for re-election: driverless Tubes, bringing with them not just a more high-tech underground but an almighty confrontation with the Tube unions. In the midst of endless wrangles with the unions over Olympic bonuses, Boris Johnson might imagine that’s a popular gesture with voters. Yet he is both dead right and completely wrong about “driverless” trains. Driverless is ...

One could hardly write the script as fiction. On the very day that Gordon Brown is teetering on the edge of oblivion and the House of Lords, one of his cherished projects, the London Underground PPP is breathing its last. The news that Transport for London is going to be taking over Tube Lines and running the contracts to maintain the Tube leaked out on the very day that voters ...

I do not generally have much sympathy for Bob Crow. He runs a union as a political project, and therefore much of what he says is obviously contradictory. He wants renationalisation and an end to private sector involvement, yet his constant threatening of strikes and his very confrontational style of negotiation means that not only is no one prepared to listen to what he says, but also that the last ...

Tim O'Toole, the managing director of London Underground who is leaving at the end of the month, launched a scathing attack on the £30bn Public Private Partnership created by Gordon Brown to fund the refurbishment of the Tube in an exclusive interview with the Standard. Mr O'Toole an American who joined London Underground six years ago after a career on freight railways in the US, also warned Londoners that while major ...

When I first met Tim O'Toole, soon after he was appointed to head London Underground, he was deeply ensconced in my book, Down the Tube, the story of the Underground's ill-fated Public Private Partnership. He was reading it for a second time which illustrated the thoroughness of his approach to the job as he was desperate to understand the concept before starting work. It was not just through book learning that ...