Christian Wolmar's August newsletter

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Christian Wolmar

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Aug 8, 2011, 2:20:37 PM8/8/11

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Dear subscriber

A shorter newsletter than usual because its summer and quiet out there, as long as you are not near a riot zone. Certainly with hackgate, famine in Somalia and now London’s burning (my stepdaughter’s boyfriend’s bike shops was relieved of its 25 bikes yesterday), there is little space for transport issues, apart from the closure of the consultation on HS2 which attracted some attention.

I have written about that in the latest Rail which will be on the site next month, as I picked holes in both the anti and pro cases. The argument does seem, at times, to degenerate into naked propaganda on both sides. While I am sceptical, to say the least, of the case for HS2, some of the arguments deployed against it are very narrowly focussed and nakedly anti-rail. And on the other hand, claims like HS2 will create one million jobs are fatuous nonsense with no analytical basis

However, there is one important piece of news. As an experiment, a publisher, Kemsing, has put my book, Down the Tube, on the Public Private Partnership of the London Underground as a Kindle book on Amazon. Apart from slight updating and a new foreword – and correcting the error on the first page – it’s pretty much the text I wrote in 2002 which, euh, predicted the demise of the PPP. Re-reading it for this edition, I certainly found it relevant and, indeed, important. It was after all Gordon Brown’s second most costly mistake after messing up the economy through relying on his banker friends.

The Kindle version is available for just £6 here If this works, I will put my book on rail privatisation, Broken Rails which is also out of print, on Kindle, too.

Given the paucity of news, and the fact that I am in the final stages of writing my book on the US railroads – 95,000 words done, about 20,000 left – there are only the two Rail columns added to the site. The first welcome the new boss of the Office of Rail Regulation and suggests that ensuring its reports are written in comprehensible English would be a good start. The second argues that the opposition by the unions to vertical integration for Merseyrail might backfire.

I am giving lots of talks in September and October, and there is now a calendar on my site. I am always happy to do these talks for railway societies and other groups, and I have PowerPoint presentations on all my books.

Finally keep on clicking on the ads on the site. Every click helps pay for the site. Thanks , and have a good rest of the summer when the sun comes out.