That end of the world feeling
At the end of the world is Vladivostok, 5700 miles from Moscow and 11 time zones from London. The journey there took 20 hours door to door, but was pretty uneventful, with most of it being spent on...
View ArticleThe longest, biggest, greatest railway
It’s all about size. The Transsiberian is of course the longest railway in the world by far, but it’s big in every sense. The trains themselves are long, with an assortment of coaches for sleeping,...
View ArticleTranssiberian – the prettiest section
The 450 km journey from Ulan Ude to Irkutsk oddly takes one from Asia to Europe. It is a beautiful ride with first a river, then quite steep mountains and then the lake, as big as the sea, bordering...
View ArticleMoscow at last
The last couple of legs on the Transsiberian were not quite as exciting as the earlier ones. On the third one, we had had the benefit of the Rossya, train number one, far more comfortable and even...
View ArticleCyclists can be the problem
It is impossible to shirk away from the problem of problem cyclists. I can’t claim to be 100 per cent law abiding given that at times it is far safer for me to commit minor transgressions but I do pay...
View ArticleEnter Ms M at the Department
While most people have been celebrating with mince pies and Xmas crackers, the Department for Transport has been busy rearranging the deckchairs in the run up to the holiday season following the West...
View ArticleOh, daddy, when did the London Underground open?
On Thursday, January 10, the London Underground is 150 years old. It is a fantastic milestone, the anniversary of the world’s first underground railway and the only one ever to have been operated by...
View ArticleTransport disasters are mostly a thing of the past – fingers crossed
An intelligent feature in CityAM – http://www.cityam.com/forum/helicopter-tragedy-why-disasters-are-so-thankfully-rare#.UPfMmHaWffI.twitter – argues that disasters are few and far between. Indeed,...
View ArticleAnnouncement madness
I know this is slightly a hardy perennial, but last night’s trip to Ashford International and back was the pits in terms of the number and vacuousness of the announcements. Both trains were late, and...
View ArticleWifi is not an add-on
One of the stupidest things that TOCs are doing is charging for internet use. That’s rather like asking for money for the lighting or the toilet. They should, instead, be looking at the competition....
View ArticleA bluff that the train companies can only lose
There is a big game of bluff going on. The fact that all four bidders in the collapsed Great Western franchise have filed a court case to try to reclaim the money lost in the bidding process does not...
View ArticleFranchise fiasco deepens
The Department for Transport bombarded me with several copies of the press release on franchising but that did not make its contents any more coherent.Essentially, apart from speeding up the process on...
View ArticleHS2 exposes flaws in democratic process
The confirmation that HS2 will need a paving bill in order to be able to obtain funds for continued preparatory work shows just how early in the whole process we still are. First the needs to go...
View ArticleNAO report raises all the right issues
On the scale of damning, the NAO report into HS2 is around 9 out of 10. Remember this is an organisation that pulls its punches, showing draft reports to ministers and generally avoids rocking the boat...
View ArticleHS2 spending plan puts project at risk
It’s hardly surprising that the Spending Review announcement was seen as a good day to bury the bad news that the projected cost of HS2 has now soared to £42.6bn which amounts to £50bn if rolling stock...
View ArticleCycling announcement is dishonest spin
To suggest that today’s announcement of £148m over two years is the biggest cycling investment programme ever is both dishonest and laughable. When I was on the board of Cycling England, we had a...
View ArticleEast Coast set to remain in the public sector (sort of)
There are some stories in the modern railway that you could not make up because they would be too far-fetched. The story of the PPP on the London Underground was one, but now we have another great...
View ArticleCycling tragedies require a rapid response
The spate of five cyclists being killed within the past fortnight on London’s streets demands an urgent respone. As I have argued in the Observer in the piece posted on this site, the Cycling Vision...
View ArticleRailways are back on the government’s books
The news, slipped out just before Xmas, that Network Rail’s debt will simply be lumped in with the government’s in September 2014, is an occasion for a bit of gloating as well as of concern. This...
View ArticleFirst class distraction from fares rises
The Daily Mail, the Tory house paper, splashes on plans by ministers to transform first class coaches into standard ones in order to accommodate more passengers. This is a very clever bit of PR as it...
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