DfT’s decisions will keep external advice to a minimum
Back in September 2011, Network Rail published initial industry plans for England and Wales and for Scotland. The plans were one of several important milestones in ORR’s periodic review work…
Now is the time for rail bodies to get their high-speed Act together
There’s an incredible amount of detail within the High Speed Rail (London-West Midlands) Act 2017 – better known as the HS2 Act. It weighs in at 452 pages and provides…
Automatic for the people? ATO’s positives and pitfalls
Thursday February 16 was a day of irony. ASLEF revealed that drivers working for Southern had rejected the deal the union had presented them. Meanwhile, in the Institution of Mechanical…
RMT plans to fight more battles… but the war looks lost
There’s always been a tension between the front and rear of a train. It’s some decades since freight trains lost their guards and the vans in which they rode on…
Operators need to be less conservative and more ‘canny’
Sometimes we make a simple thing sound difficult. Take this phrase from a recent report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers: “On-demand door-to-door mobility solutions”. For context the report is…
Will more flexible HLOS restore confidence in the railway?
This year should see governments in Westminster and Holyrood reveal what they want from Britain’s railway over the five years from 2019. With the rail industry’s love of jargon, acronyms…
Time flies by…
I’m not a train driver. I have sat in a cab and made a train move. I’ve even made one stop in roughly the right place. That’s far from being…
Union scaremongering does nothing to help passengers
Britain has a safe railway. It’s the safest in Europe by many measures, including the number of passenger fatalities and injuries per billion passenger train kilometres. It’s a record that’s…