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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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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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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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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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 926: Integrated transport, an old concept that must be revived
Remember ‘integrated transport’. It was a concept promoted by John Prescott, the much underrated transport secretary whose excellent 10 year ...
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Rail 925: Franchising on life support
After a year of paralysis in the rail industry, there finally appears to be some movement from the Department for ...
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Rail 924: The robots are not coming that fast
In the midst of all the chaos and uncertainty on the railways caused by the pandemic, it is surprising that ...
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Rail 923: In a logical world, peak fares would be abolished but….
One clear result of the Covid crisis is that we have to recognise that moving around more is not necessarily ...
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Rail 922: How to recreate a joined-up railway
In recent weeks I have interviewed numerous ex-BR managers for my new book which is about the successes and failures ...
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Rail 921: The railways must adapt to survive
Well not even Mystic Wolmar if he were a genius could have predicted the events of 2020. As I keep ...
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Rail 920: ORR focus on little used stations is an own goal
Lots of fun has been had over the past couple of weeks with Berney Arms, an obscure station in Norfolk ...
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Rail 919: Welsh report shows that building roads is not the only or best option
Ever since the creation of a ministry of transport, just over a century ago, there has been a presumption of ...
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Rail 918: Why rail replacement services are so dreadful
If there’s one phrase that deters people from trying to take a train, it is ‘a rail replacement service will ...
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Rail 917: Network Rail’s not invented here syndrome
Network Rail has rediscovered research. One of the great losses to the industry at privatisation was the rapid sell-off and ...
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Rail 916: So that’s why Crossrail was delayed…
Had it not been for the Covid-19 crisis, the further delays and extra costs of the Crossrail project would have ...
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Rail 915: So what were franchises for?
So what were they for? The question ‘what is franchising for?’ which I have been asking for the past couple ...
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