Christian Wolmar's February newsletter
Christian Wolmar
Dear subscriber
With the weather calming down and Egypt dominating the headlines, transport has been less to the fore recently, but nevertheless there has been no shortage of developments.
The high fares rises on the railways attracted considerable attention and so did the record number of passengers, and I did TV and radio interviews on both. There was, too, the release of the franchise review consultation paper, which I have written about in the latest Rail column which will not been on the site until later this month.
I have been working on a pamphlet on how co-operative structures could be used in the rail industry which will be published in the next few weeks by Co-operatives UK, which hopefully will influence government thinking on the idea. It fits in very well with Big Society ideas, but there seems very little substance to these when push comes to shove.
There are all the usual new items on the website, plus a couple of others. I wrote a piece for the Evening Standard on driverless trains which was a bit of Boris bluster and, away from the issue of transport, a review of a book about Germany before the war, Sown with Corn, which is an absolute must read.
Of the usuals, my two Rail columns are on the McNulty review which I argue does not go deep enough into the dysfunctional structure of the industry and the HS2 debate which is also covered in depth in the comments on the article in The Times which has broken records on the site by attracting more than 100 comments.
In Transport Times I have written about the shared space experiment in Exhibition Road which is taking shape and looks to be a very exciting project. Finally, the TSSA column is on the coalition’s rail policy – or lack of it. I have also been putting things on the TSSA blog – do visit that at http://www.tssa.org.uk/
I have garnered 1,000 followers on Twitter, since I started tweeting regularly back in November. I have, after initial doubts, found it a very useful medium. It’s a way of introducing people to longer pieces, of communicating quickly about developments and of sharing information and ideas. So I was wrong to be hesitant about it. It can, though, be misused and some people tweet far too much – they know who they are – or still tell you what they have for breakfast or that they are standing in the playground waiting for their 8 year old to come out of school.
I confine myself to tweets about transport issues, with the odd digression about QPR or other experiences, such as customer standards in hotels and restaurants, and even possibly the odd general political remark. But definitely I will stick to transport in the main. You can follow me by adding @christianwolmar to your list. I do urge non-users to start using Twitter, even if you do not plan to send any tweets, as you can simply follow people.
Tweeting has delivered a big increase in visitors to the website, and the high speed rail debate, is really raging furiously, and several other posts have attracted lots of comments. Note that sometimes my posts seem a bit out of date because I only place the articles from magazines on the site when they are no longer on sale, so usually a few weeks after publication.
For new subscribers, I stiil have a stock of my Fire and Steam hardbacks under my bed for a fiver plus £2 75 postage – just pay by paypal or email me for postal address.
I am now using google mail for this service, and am keen to hear of any problems, though of course I realise you won’t be reading this if you don’t get the newsletter!
That’s all for now,
Christian
Please note my new email address is christia...@gmail.com Please use this when replying.