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Letter to The Times: Lack of resilience of today’s railway
Sir. The collapse of the train services out of King’s Cross and Paddington after the announcement that the Hitachi trains needed to have safety checks shows the lack of resilience in today’s railway (“Rail operators ordered to end chaos caused by train cracks”, May 10). Despite the fact that only a limited timetable is being run because of the pandemic, and a few spare train sets are available, most...
Let’s spell it out: cars are a menace
By Christian Wolmar and Pearl Ahrens In terms of transport, the new post-pandemic normal is looking worse than the old normal. Without a clear strategy for how to deter people from jumping in their cars as they start travelling again, the roads will become even more congested than before, with all the accompanying environmental and social damage. Restraining car use – whether through pricing and taxation or physical measures...
Rail 928: It’s the passengers who count
The future of rail has been rather a long time coming. The report on ‘Trains fit for the future’ published at the end of March by the Commons Transport Committee has been a couple of years in gestation and has lost a key part of its remit along the journey. Two years is a long time in the rail business, particularly given the way the world has changed in...
Rail 927: Cutting costs on the railways is not easy
Let’s assume that ‘back to normal’ is, say, an 80 per cent railway. In other words, that the timetable will be pared back in order to match the lower level of demand that is likely to be the norm for some time to come. Even the optimists –and I am not one of them – accept that it will be a couple of years before we get back to...
March 2021 Newsletter
Christian Wolmar’s March newsletter: Anonymity is killing fair debate Dear subscriber, The ferocity of the arguments over low traffic neighbourhoods still never ceases to amaze me. I wrote, in a piece for LabourList, only half-jokingly that they had become the most controversial transport issue of the day, greater even than HS2 or the £27bn roads programme. The rows have continued and several LTNs have been removed by councils after...
Latest headlines
Letter to The Times: Lack of resilience of today’s railway
Let’s spell it out: cars are a menace
Rail 928: It’s the passengers who count
Rail 927: Cutting costs on the railways is not easy
March 2021 Newsletter
High costs are damaging the potential for rail recovery
Letter to The Guardian: When I played at Wentworth golf course
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About Christian Wolmar
Christian Wolmar is an award winning writer and broadcaster specialising in transport and is the author of a series of books on railway history. He was Labour's candidate for the 2016 Richmond Park & North Kingston by-election and also ran to be Labour's candidate in the last London mayoral election. Read more >>
RT @SilvertownTn Does @TfL need an independent technical & economic review body to prevent it making serious errors based on institutional group-think, such as forecasting unrealistic opening dates for Crossrail, or moving forward with the obviously disastrous Silvertown Tunnel? @Heidi_LDN twitter.com/SilvertownTn/s… pic.twitter.com/1dsutcc2wH
