Storms and bad weather
Senior Network Rail man Robin Gisby noted on February 6’s Today programme: “It feels like we’re having 1-in-100 year events every year or so.” With the battering Britain and its…
Do we really need the ‘Withered Arm’?
Destruction of an 80-metre section of sea wall at Dawlish has reopened the debate about the merits of finding an alternative rail route into Devon and Cornwall. The obvious alternative…
NR transfer pushes ORR towards redundancy
Network Rail’s debt are now our debts. Of course, they always were, it was only accounting niceties and fudge that kept debts guaranteed by government from government’s books. With the…
Switching Network Rail debts to government could increase sell-off pressure
This week could see Network Rail’s debts of around £40 billion added to Chancellor George Osborne’s account. It depends on a decision from the Office of National Statistics which is…
Network Rail faces fines for late trains
In the three months that constitute Quarter 2, around 122,600 trains ran late as Network Rail posted performance that varied between 0.9 and 5.1 percentage points behind its targets. These…
Plenty of work on the Great Western Main Line
An awards event in Bristol last Friday took me west of Reading on the Great Western Main Line for the first time in many months. Most recent attention around Reading…