Christian Wolmar

HS2 has never had the attention it needs and the scrutiny its scale demands. This is Britain’s largest infrastructure project, dwarfing the Channel Tunnel by a factor of around ten in terms of the cost and yet it has been allowed to bumble along as if it were the construction a little branch line to a Suffolk village. Ministers come and go, civil servants stick their heads in the sand and the media gets bored with the story apart from covering protestors digging themselves under Euston or living in trees. Now there is a brief focus on the scheme with the ‘reset’ which has been 18 months in gestation but I suspect that the project, which is costing taxpayers £7 billion every year, will again retreat back to the shadows.

The news that the Royal Train is heading for that great siding in the sky appears to be at odds with the monarch's longstanding and keenly felt support for environmental causes. King Charles took up issues of sustainability long before they became fashionable and he even runs one of his Bentleys on biofuel. The timing does seem particularly bad – as this year celebrations are being held to mark the 200th anniversary of the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway. The train is only used very infrequently, not least because it is so expensive to move out of its shed at Wolverton near Milton Keynes.

When heading to China on a business trip, I was somewhat bemused to be warned about the banquets I would be attending. Do not sit next to the host, I was told. I was to find out why. Learning the rituals of banquets is an essential part of doing business in China. I was treated to at least one every day on a ten-day trip around the country – and sometimes two or three. There is no such thing as a casual business lunch. Any meal will turn into a semi-formal event held in a private room and hosted by the most senior person in the organisation. The meal starts slowly, with a few rather unappealing cold dishes laid out on a spinner that sits on a round table, though initially no one sits down.

The man who walked up the stairs was the embodiment of the cartoon image of a paedophile. Grey, thinning hair, a couple of days’ stubble and a gabardine raincoat. He had come to persuade us that the age of consent for sexual activity should be reduced to four years old ‘because that’s when children have the ability to express themselves’. The group managed to fool many liberals into thinking free love for children was the logical next step The ‘us’ was the small collective who worked for Release, a charity that helped young people who had got in trouble with the law, usually over drug use. This was 1976, a time when liberation was in the air and social mores had changed more rapidly in the past two decades than in the previous two centuries.

Tokyo Nothing can prepare the good people from Tokyo Metro – who are coming to London to run the Elizabeth Line – from the culture shock they will undoubtedly suffer here. Japan, as we all know, is a very different place and the way they operate their transport system is very different to how business is conducted here. To make it even harder for those plucky Japanese managers to adapt, the key difference is one that can only be felt rather than seen – the utter divergence in the business ethos of the two nations. Nowhere is that better expressed than in their respective railway networks. For a start, Tokyo Metro is not, unlike Transport for London, responsible for all the underground lines in the Japanese capital. Far from it.

Earlier this month, the fortunate folk of Frankfurt were entertained by the 11th annual tram-drivers competition, with entries from 26 teams representing 20 countries across Europe. This is as crazy as it sounds, a kind of Olympiad for trams. How do trams compete, given they are not exactly flexible in terms of where they can go and cannot spin round Le Mans-type racetracks? Well, the devisers of this contest have created a series of challenges for the teams of three – two tram drivers, one male and one female, and an assistant. The obvious tests included coming to a halt within a centimetre of a stop along a 300-metre track and rushing out, fire extinguisher in hand, to put out a lineside fire.

When the operators of the most popular steam train service in Britain decided to challenge the safety authorities, they were confident that sentiment and nostalgia would win out. They’ve been proved wrong. The health and safety brigade has triumphed and consequently the Jacobite train, popularised in a Harry Potter film and running along one of the nation’s most attractive rail lines between Fort William and Mallaig on the West Coast, will no longer operate. It’s the culmination of a lengthy battle between the train-spotters and the grey men of the Office of Road and Rail (ORR), who are insistent that a temporary concession to allow the trains to operate without key safety equipment cannot be extended.

It’s a fabulous combination: travelling by train and sleeping. And the good news is that the concept of sleeper trains is being revived. The bad news is that, like trams and trolleybuses, a wonderful form of travel was allowed to decline in the first place. The first sleeper carriages – as opposed to trains you happened to fall asleep on – were introduced in the US in the late 1830s, but these provided little more than hard wooden benches. It was George Pullman who built the first luxury sleeper coaches when he founded his eponymous company in 1867. America, with its vast expanses and a newly opened transcontinental line, was fertile territory, and Pullman coaches were soon being attached to long-distance trains.

The Queen loved the royal train. The Royal yacht was a luxury that was more for show than convenience but the train was a unique way for her to travel in comfort and without the hassle of flying. Modestly fitted out in a seventies vinyl panelled style with little extra decor, the Royal Train suited her unfussy taste and was easily accessible for her at Windsor. Therefore it was no surprise that the plan for a final rail journey had long been part of the London Bridge operation if she passed away in Scotland. It was envisaged that the Royal Train, which incidentally was not owned by the Queen but by the German state owned railway company DB Cargo, would be used to take her body down to London. She would have approved of this for good reason.

Petersfield signal box is in the wrong place. Or at least it is now. When it was built in the 1880s, it was in precisely the right place, near the tracks and next to the level crossing that the signalman controlled. It had to be. Signal boxes had a series of big levers which controlled both signals and the points on the track. In the days before electric motors, the boxes had to be as near as possible to the points or shifting the levers became too difficult, especially in cold weather. Petersfield is Grade II listed because it is a rare example of a box containing equipment developed by the London & South Western Railway, which built most of the lines out of Waterloo.