Rail 965: All hail the ‘Nobody gives a Damn’ railway
Christian Wolmar Let me introduce you to the NGAD Railway. Or you may have encountered it already if you know ...
The Queen should have gone by train
The Queen loved the royal train. The Royal yacht was a luxury that was more for show than convenience but ...
Rail 964: The terrible toll of suicide on the tracks
Lady luck has not shone on Richard Hughes-Jones. Well it did at first. As a five year old, he remembers ...
Spectator letter: Faux capitalism
Ross Clark's compelling critique (August 13) of the water companies comes to the wrong conclusion. He is right to say ...
Avanti winning the wrong competition
When the railways were privatised a quarter of a century ago, Prime Minister John Major said that it was to ...
Rail 963: Can Tories really do Net Zero?
We have to talk about Net Zero. Seriously. And what it really means in terms of transport. The dismal contest ...
The real story of British Rail
A quarter of a century on, the political party that abolished British Rail seems to be busy recreating it. Back ...
Rail 962: Ideology rules the railways
Halfway through the launch of Rail Partners, I had one of those jumping out of the bath moments which made ...
July 2022 newsletter
It is difficult not to be depressed as I write this during the heatwave. I would in fact enjoy the ...
Rail 961: Some ideas for Labour
When I first started writing this column in the mid 1990s, it had already become pretty clear that the days ...
Rail 960: Confusion over future of rail
The government’s consultation paper on the Williams Shapps report published on June 9 mistakenly put the year down as 2021 rather ...
From Marples to Crossrail – how things change
The new and very thorough biography of Ernest Marples, The Shadow behind Beeching, which has just been published by Pen ...
How to sort out the railways
If there is one thing that the current rail strike tells us, it is that no one is in charge ...
Rail 959: Why it’s only the state that can sort out the railways
The railways are suffering from a series of intermingled crises and as Nigel Harris argued so cogently in the last ...
Strike chaos serves both sides’ interests
It’s fortunate that many Londoners have become accustomed to working from home over the past couple of years because they ...
Rail 958: Crossrail gives us the chance to celebrate
The time for carping is over. Let’s for once just celebrate and enjoy some good news. Yes, I know, I ...
Rail 957: How SouthEastern scandal exposed franchise failings
In writing this column every fortnight since 1995, I have always questioned the value of privatising an industry that is ...
Rail 956: Heading for trouble
There’s trouble brewing down the line. Industrial relations trouble, that is. The RMT union has launched a ballot of its ...
How Great British Railways can learn from the old BR
British Railways lives again. Well sort of. The Queen’s Speech contains plans for a Transport Bill the centrepiece of which ...
Letter to The Times: Crossrail does not take away money from the North
Your leading article (“Digging Deep”, May 5) rightly celebrates the opening of what is a truly world-class railway. It took ...