With the opening of St Pancras and its high-speed line to the continent, the approval of Crossrail, and glimpses of the futuristic bullet trains that will soon call London home, there are plenty of encouraging signs that Britain's rail network is in good health. They don't come much more inspiring than the former railway man who has set up his own rail service. Grand Central Rail was established in 2000 by former British Rail......

Wandsworth Council have given consent to six planning applications and one variation concerning detailed designs for one of our favourite lump of bricks - the Battersea Power Station: These consents, representing a total area of 4.5 million sq ft mean that, for the first time, the project can now move forward towards the construction stage and leasing programme. Victor Hwang, President of Parkview International explains why it's taken so long to get this far:......

Tonight: Fancy a little danceable punchy guitar driven night out? Perhaps you might like to catch The Sunshine Underground at Dingwalls. Friday: With some grand new material Kaibosh are keeping busy this year taking it to the road. We'll bring you a review of their new EP as soon as we have it but in the meantime you can catch them at Clockwork, 66-68 Pentonville Road N1, doors at 8. We like trains, as......

Breakfast in London and lunch in Sydney isn't quite just around the corner yet, but plans are afoot to get us to the other side of the world in the time that it takes for a round trip on the Northern line. It's all about the scramjet. A scramjet - or supersonic combustion ramjet - is mechanically very simple. It has no moving parts and takes all of the oxygen it needs to burn......

A week or so ago we began asking for Londonist readers to start sending in their 'opinion pieces' to us for publication over the weekend. Really what we wanted were your rants and your moans about London life, the stuff that you really needed to vent. Now somewhat unsurprisingly a few of the emails we received were about London's somewhat notorious transport system, so we thought we'd post two of those emails here today.......

The Waterloo & City line is to be closed for as long as five months from next April so that "urgent repair" work can be undertaken. "Travel hell" hardly begins to cover it; the odd little W&C line, known to its "fans" as "The Drain" relieves a terrific amount of pressure on the Underground system. If closed, the thousands of commuters pouring in from the southern suburbs and attempting to get to the Square......

Nothing quite says "tragic beauty" like a spot of aggregate, and no colour is quite so regal as "greygreen". Yes folks, the Princess Diana Memorial Storm Sewer is in the headlines again. You may remember the fountain; it's been "troubled", as sub-editors say when asked to euphemise around the word "a relentless disaster". It was criticised from the start by royalists and polo-necked Clerkenwell types alike for being, basically, a circular ditch. However, it......