New African economic history is challenging earlier wisdom by showing, for example, that railways have had profound effects, both positive and negative on African societies.
Reuters/Thomas Mukoya
African economic history has had a renaissance and its most valuable contribution has been to show that Africans have not always been poor, nor are current poverty levels an inevitable destiny.
Stopped in its tracks.
Nicholas Hair/Wikimedia Commons
Derailed train cars carrying oil have more communities concerned about spills. What’s behind the oil-by-rail boom and a federal agency’s ‘urgent’ call last week for better safety?
Plaid Cymru want to expand the Welsh government’s Bwcabus service.
credit: John Bristow
If you’re looking for key battles to watch in the New South Wales election, which could help decide who forms the next state government, then you need to know the story of the Newcastle railway line.
To the surprise of many speculative investors in the share market who had tipped Eurostar, Inter City Railways, a joint venture between Stagecoach and Virgin, won the franchise to run the East Coast mainline…
Same service, higher prices.
Gareth Fuller/PA Wire
The announcement that rail fares will increase by up to 5.5% is yet another indictment of the failure of the country’s privatised railway industry. Railway privatisation was sold to the public on the basis…
Trains that use magnets to levitate above the tracks might sound like something from Back to the Future, but the concept of magnetic levitation has been around for many years. Maglev trains, which use…
Manchester, could be part of a new megacity in the north.
Daniel Nisbet
The UK’s economy is highly unbalanced; we have the worst regional disparities in the developed world and London’s property prices are also the world’s most expensive – second only to Monaco. Rebalancing…
Spend to save, or just spend when needed?
Ben Birchall/PA
With the collapse of the line at Dawlish in Devon cutting off railway services to Plymouth and the southwest for months, Secretary of State for Transport Patrick McLoughlin MP and Network Rail chiefs were…
The assault on British coastlines by storm, flood and sea this winter is a taste of things to come. Rising sea levels and a greater risk of coastal flooding are a significant future threat. Britain is…
There is increasing talk of electrification of the UK’s railway network. But electrification is an expensive business, requiring much new hardware including masts, wiring, substations and so on. Such an…
Professsor in Transport and Supply Chain Management and Deputy Director, Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies (ITLS) at the University of Sydney Business School, University of Sydney