It’s gone quiet on Crossrail recently, and they like it like that. No news is good news because the past three years have not been kind to the project. As I am updating my book on the project to coincide with the opening, I have been on a couple of visits recently and spent a lot of time talking to the project’s managers who are quietly optimistic that their...

For more than a century and a half, rail safety has improved thanks to learning from the causes of past accidents and, particularly, serious disasters. However, the ‘accidental death’ verdict of the jury in the recent inquest into the Croydon tram accident in November 2016 is the latest episode in a saga that seems set to prevent the real story of this eminently preventable disaster ever being exposed. The...

There seems to be a bit of a pattern to my summer writings in my attempt to keep away from the big issues such as Great British Railways and recovery plans that I know will dominate the year ahead. In my last column, I wrote about a town, Louth, which had sadly lost its railway in the Beeching cuts and was therefore failing to attract the number of tourists...