Christian Wolmar

Looking at Monday's Panorama programme again was a dispiriting experience. It had all the faults of modern TV documentaries with much emphasis on personal stories and nice pictures but very little substance. The message was incredibly muddled and anyone not versed in the issues would have struggled to understand what on earth was going on. It failed to explain propely the background, merely allowing numerous passengers to moan rather, as ...

Local people in Victorian times were generally delighted when the railway arrived to connect them with the outside world, bringing untold benefits. Unfortunately, before they could get the trains, they got the navvies who built it and who could prove very disruptive to local life. The navvies – an abbreviation of navigator as they were the direct descendants of the men who built the canals - were a special breed of ...

In a way, it’s funny. The Brpitish railway system is slowly being renationalised, but not by our own government. Rather, it is being taken over by foreign state-owned railways that now have an interest in almost half the franchises, and in one of the three open access operators as well. This has been highlighted by two further incursions in recent weeks, although the issue has barely ...

Justine Greening, the new transport secretary, faces a daunting learning curve on the complexities of the rail industry as she prepares to make decisions on a range of railway projects that involve spending hundreds of millions, and even billions, of pounds. The most difficult will be keeping the biggest rail project this country has ever seen, the construction of a high speed line between London and Birmingham on track, in ...

Gloom descended as commuters found that their fares would be rising by 8 per cent in January. This followed hot on the heels of news from the Office of Rail Regulation that overcrowding was getting worse – hardly a surprise for most passengers given that rail use has increased by almost half in the past decade and there are barely any extra services. To cap it all, there was now talk of ...

The collective wail of commuters was almost audible at stations across the country when they discovered that their season tickets would be going up by 8 per cent in January. It is a predictable and understandable complaint, but it will do nothing to move the government away from its policy of raising fares by 3 per cent above RPI over each of the next three years in order to reduce ...