Christian Wolmar

The Department for Transport bombarded me with several copies of the press release on franchising but that did not make its contents any more coherent.Essentially, apart from speeding up the process on the successful publicly owned East Coast, the whole franchise programme has been delayed, with temporary extensions to most franchises.  The most extraordinary bit about this abject failure is the statement that ' in order to roll out the programme ...

There is a big game of bluff going on. The fact that all four bidders in the collapsed Great Western franchise have filed a court case to try to reclaim the money lost in the bidding process does not mean they want to go to court. Quite the opposite. They are merely putting pressure on the  Department to cough up. However, as often is the case with railway companies, they fail ...

‘The Times they are a’changin’, but no one quite knows how. The ‘Command Paper’ which was supposed to set out ministerial thinking on the structure of Network Rail and was due out before Xmas is still, at the time of writing in mid-February, weeks away according to the latest pronouncement from Justine Greening, the now not so new Transport Secretary. The delay is clearly the result of fundamental divisions within the ...

Memo to train companies: I have had several recent dealings to put my children on the car insurance with Direct Line. While their ads may be irritating, their customer service is unparalleled. They will, for example, put someone on for a day or a week, just charging the pro-rata annual rate, and a modest £15 admin fee.  Similarly,if you need to take someone off the insurance, they will refund the ...

Train travel  is becoming more of a hassle almost daily and much of it is down to the way that the train operators delight in making life more difficult for their passengers. I was a consultant on the recent Channel 4 Dispatches documentary Train journeys from hell which was screened on March 21st but initially I was reluctant to appear on it because the title, which had been set in ...

In a recent letter to The Times (which was reprinted in Rail 659), Theresa Villiers, the rail minister argued  that the train operating companies function in a free commercial environment. Train companies are free to lease extra coaches and extend their trains, she said gaily, ignoring the harsh reality of the bureaucratic nightmare that is today’s fragmented railway. The truth is that the train operators cannot simply take on new rolling ...