About Christian
Christian Wolmar: 'Wolmar' - Opinion & Analysis Columnist (General and strategic issues)
Christian Wolmar’s RAIL magazine column has run continously since 1994 focussing primarily on political and social aspects of the railway. Christian was formerly The Independent’s transport correspondent and is
now a freelance writer/broadcaster specialising in transport.
A journalist for most of his working life, he mainly concentrates on transport matters, but has also written on a wide range of subjects from cricket to the Private Finance Initiative. After graduating from Warwick university in 1971, Christian worked on Retail Newsagent, Marketing and the Hampstead & 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 currently writes for the Evening Standard, Independent, Yorkshire Post, Public Finance, TSSA Journal and Transport Times in which he has a regular column. Christian has become one of the UK's leading commentators on transport broadcasting frequently on radio and TV as a regular pundit on national news bulletins of terrestrial channels and Sky, as well as virtually every radio news programme from World at One and the World Tonight to Radio One's NewsBeat and LBC.
His books include Stagecoach (1999), The Great British Railway Disaster (1997), a humorous series of anecdotes about rail privatisation, and On the Wrong Line, 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. His latest book, Fire and Steam, a new history of the railways in Britain was published by Atlantic Books in September.
He is a member of the board of Cycling England with a special interest in intermodal transport and uses his bicycle as his principal means of transport around London. He is a keen cricketer, plays tennis regularly and has become an enthusiastic but slow runner, taking part in half marathons. His articles since 2000, along with reviews of his books, are archived in his website at www.christianwolmar.co.uk.
