Mr Christian Wolmar | Writer and Broadcaster specialising in transport.
Christian Wolmar

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, transport issues, the London Underground and the railways. 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 elsewhere on this website). His history of Britain's Railways, Fire and Steam, was also widely acclaimed and in 2009 he published Blood, Iron and Gold, how railways tranformed the world which has also been published in the US by Profile. His book on the role of railways in war, Engines of War is due to be published in September. Christian 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. Christian recently celebrated half of a century of supporting Queens Park Rangers whose fortunes are definitely on the up.     Christian is on the board of trustees of the Railway Children, a charity which helps homeless and destitute children at stations home and abroad. Christian is keen to help young journalists and has several times been a judge on the "Best Student Magazine" in the National Union of Students Journalism Awards. Christian has three children and currently lives in Islington.