August newsletter: The driverless car conundrum solved
I have finally resolved a conundrum that has been bugging me for several years. Despite writing numerous articles and two ...
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Rail 937: New station, old timetable
There seems to be a bit of a pattern to my summer writings in my attempt to keep away from ...
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Rail 936: Louth, a gem hidden from the railway
I know I really ought to write about all the very important things going on in the railway. There’s no ...
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Letter to the Financial Times: No such thing as a half driverless car
Patrick Magee (Has big tech backfired on robotaxis?, July 20) has missed the key point about relying on driver aids ...
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Rail 935: Can Network Rail be tamed?
The story of the next couple of years in the rail industry will be how to tame the elephant in ...
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Rail 934: A bridge over troubled concrete
Over the years, as a journalist, I have occasionally come across stories that simply do not make sense. Brexit is ...
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Rail 933: 10 questions about Williams Shapps report
There is no doubt that the Williams Shapps report could have been a lot worse. There is undoubtedly a strong ...
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Letter to the Guardian: active oldies
My very smug letter to the Guardian in response to one accusing us oldies of sitting on our butts all ...
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Rail 932: Great? New plan for railways falls short
If you want to understand the intentions behind the Government’s White Paper heralding the arrival of Great British Railways, look ...
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The Great British Railway is a fudge riding for a fail
We all knew it was a mistake and we told them so. When the Tory government pushed through the privatisation ...
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Rail 931: British government should participate in the Eurostar rescue
When people suggest to me that it would be best if politics were left out of the railways, I always ...
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Railcard scam is nothing short of theft by the state
Last week, buying a ticket for my first rail journey in six months, I said to the kindly ticket clerk, ...
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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 ...
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Rail 930: Let’s stop pretending you can impose capitalism on the railways
We are entering a period of Big Government. Indeed, we have been in one for the past year. Neoliberalism is ...
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Rail 929: WISPer it, the 30 year plan for the railways
Just in case there were not enough ‘initiatives’ being launched by his department, Grant Shapps, the transport secretary decided a ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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March 2021 Newsletter
Christian Wolmar's March newsletter: Anonymity is killing fair debate Dear subscriber, The ferocity of the arguments over low traffic neighbourhoods ...
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High costs are damaging the potential for rail recovery
One of the worst outcomes of the privatisation of the railways a quarter of a century ago is the failure ...
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