Strikes and the threat of strikes, breakdowns, signal failures, crumbling infrastructure and rising crime - for every Londoner, and many commuters, too, the disastrous condition of London's underground system is a daily reminder of the political and managerial failures that have brought a critical public service to the verge of collapse. Now that the Labour government has committed the future of the Tube to the Treasury's Public/Private Partnership Scheme, the question is: in 2013 will we see as promised, a refurbished and revitalised system? Or will we be lamenting yet another instalment in a long litany of failure? Christian Wolmar is not optimistic - indeed, he sees every prospect of a reprise of the consequences that flowed from the privatisation of the railways, which he analysed in his previous book "Broken Rail". So how, he asks, did we get into this situation? Why was the Tube starved of investment by successive governments over so many years? How did the present government allow it to become a political football, a vehicle for "punishing" Ken Livingstone for the humiliation he had imposed upon them in London's first mayoral election? Why do ministers still believe, after the collapse of Railtrack, that the separation of operations from maintenance and renewal is anything other than a recipe for inefficiency and a threat to safety? This is a tale of conspiracy and intrigue with a rich cast of characters - Tony Blair, John Prescott and his puppetmaster, Gordon Brown, on the one side and Ken Livingstone and Bob Kiley, the manager Livingstone brought in to save the Tube, and his mysterious coterie of fellow Americans, on the other. For Londoners, though, the critical question is whether all these players can now put the antagonisms behind them and recreate a transport system worthy of a great capital city? Christian Wolmar explains the legacy they have inherited and analyses the problems they will face in the future.
Christian Wolmar is a writer and broadcaster specialising in transport. He has spent nearly all of his working life as a journalist, and was at The Independent from 1989 to 1997, mostly as transport correspondent. Although he mainly concentrates on transport matters, he covers other social policy issues and has written on a wide range of subjects ranging from cricket to the Private Finance Initiative.
After graduating from Warwick university in 1971, Christian worked on various publications including the Retail Newsagent, Marketing and the Hampstead and Highgate Express. He later moved to the New Statesman and the London Daily News and spent a year working for Camden council editing its magazine. He is currently a freelance, working regularly for a wide variety of publications including the Evening Standard, The Independent, the Yorkshire Post, and Public Finance. He has a regular column in both Transport Times and Rail and all his recent material, since 2000, is available on the website.
Christian has become one of the UK's leading commentators on transport matters and has won several awards for his work. He broadcasts frequently on radio and TV and is a regular pundit on the national news bulletins of terrestrial channels and Sky, as well as having appeared on virtually every radio news programme from World at One and the World Tonight to Radio One's NewsBeat and LBC.
Christian undertakes consultancy and advisory work for organisations seeking to understand the workings of the rail industry. Christian is also a regular speaker at conferences and is often asked to chair sessions at them. He is also available for after dinner speaking on his favourite topics, the London Underground and the railways. He speaks regularly at conferences in Europe and has twice travelled to Australia to deliver speeches.
His books include Stagecoach (1999), an account of the firm which rose from nothing to the FTSE 100 in 20 years, The Great British Railway Disaster (1997), a humorous series of anecdotes about rail privatisation, and On the Wrong Line, which is the definitive story of rail privatisation first published as Broken Rails in October 2001 and updated in 2005.
He has written two books on the London Underground, Down the Tube, an account of the Public Private Partnership, published in 2002, and The Subterranean Railway, published in 2004 but now available in paperback, which has been widely acclaimed by the critics (see the reviews on his website). His next book, Fire and Steam, a new history of the railways in Britain was published by Atlantic Books in 2006 and has been widely praised. It was the first history of the railways to be published for many years. Subsequently, he has written Blood, Iron and Gold an examination of the way that railways affected economic development and Engines of War, looking at the impact of railways on warfare. He has also produced DVDs on both The Subterranean Railway and Fire and Steam of the same title.
He is a member of the board of Cycling England, which sadly is due to be soon abolished, with a special interest in intermodal transport and uses his bicycle as his principal means of transport around London. He is also on the board of trustees of the Railway Children, a charity which helps homeless and destitute children at stations home and abroad.
