News and views from Britain's railways
Rail has closed the north-south divide. Northern’s services since May 20’s timetable change have been decimated with cancellations and delays. Similar problems wrack Southern’s network.More accurately, the problems in Southern…
Order. Counter-order. Disorder. They might be the makings of military disasters but they apply firmly to railways in Northern England.Most of the disorder flows from governments changing their minds. Privatisation…
We believed we could do it. Those words sum up the glorious failure of May’s timetable.They evoke a welcome spirit of trying but ultimately failing. But running a railway is…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…