Christian Wolmar

The Rail Delivery Group was the key pan-industry organisations spun out of last year’s McNulty report. Its members are the bosses of the train operating owning groups, together with a couple of senior representatives from Network Rail including its chief executive, Sir David Higgins, along with several other key industry personnel. Sir Roy McNulty, to his credit, attends which suggests an ongoing interest in ensuring his study is taken seriously. The ...

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 ...

The authors and contributors to the McNulty review have been coming out of the woodwork, angered by the version of the report that has been published.  Several people have contacted me and have been remarkably critical of the way that the process was hijacked by the Department for Transport which ultimately stifled debate and ensured that the report’s conclusions contradicted its findings. The production of the report was a fraught ...

There was something fitting, poignant even, about the fact that when Sir Roy McNulty was speaking at the press conference on his report, he kept on clicking back to the previous slide by mistake. That summed up the problem with his analysis of the ills of the rail industry. Rather than looking forward to a different way of running the railways, his recipe is really more of the same, with ...

I blogged about the McNulty report yesterday for TSSA - http://www.tssajournal.com/blogs/christian-wolmar/dream-radical-approach-railways - and will be writing about it in my next Rail column. I am also about to put the Times piece I wrote on this website which will be found in the R-Z section (which reminds me of the old London phone directories, although the blue one was S-Z wasn't it?) Just a couple of additional thoughts, though. It is ...

Here is a bold prediction about today’s report into cutting costs on the railways: whatever it finds, passengers will suffer. Sir Roy McNulty, the businessman turned quango junkie, was asked by the previous Government to find ways to curb costs on the railways, which have ballooned from £1 billion a year under British Rail to five times that level of subsidy now. His preliminary findings ...