How do you fix a problem like rail franchising?
What to do? How to fix a broken railway?The answer rather depends on how broken you think the railway is. It’s caught many headlines and, yes, it has made many…
Whitehall is pushing rail down the wrong track
Any pamphlet entitled How to be a minister is likely to have a limited audience. But that hasn’t stopped the Institute for Government with its latest primer on taking infrastructure…
Uncertainty beckons for rail franchises
Change is coming to rail franchises. Quite what is open to question.Until now, franchising has been relatively simple. The Department for Transport or Transport Scotland runs competitions for a group…
Near misses emphasise need to focus on safety
Egmanton is a level crossing on the East Coast Main Line between Newark and Retford. I suspect few passengers could find it but some may have noticed the windmill tower…
No easy answer to CrossCountry’s conundrum
Cross Country was the forgotten part of British Rail’s inter-city network. It didn’t concentrate on London and so found itself a low priority for investment.It hit privatisation 20 years ago…
SWR must reverse years of decline at Waterloo
Waterloo’s railway is generally reckoned to be Britain’s only profitable route. Income from passengers exceeds the costs of running trains and operating its tracks. Government benefits from the surplus.Those tracks…
Privatisation… nationalisation… or regionalisation?
Bold reform. That’s the call from Paul Plummer at the top of the Rail Delivery Group for the review by Keith Williams, the former chief executive of British Airways.Yet Transport…
Scotland pushes towards a better railway
Those who do nothing make no mistakes. So the saying goes and I was reminded of it while talking to a journalist from the Scotsman newspaper of the problems ScotRail…
There’s a place for rail as internet shopping boosts parcels
Cast your mind back a little over a decade. It’s January 2008 and RAIL 553 is warning that there’s little time to make use of Euston station’s freight facilities.It quotes…