This week’s journalistic lesson: never let a cow get in the way of a good rant

Let me first say that I would have written exactly the column about the dead cow that my friend and Times colleague Alice Thomson wrote, if she hadn’t pipped me to the post. En route to Labour’s conference in Manchester, Alice had been stuck on a railway paralysed by a dead cow on the line. I had heard about the cow from dozens of people at the conference, and planned a rant at safety-first attitudes — until I learned that Alice was already penning such a rant. So, making a virtue of necessity, I decided on a more in-depth investigation of how and why these idiocies come about.

And the more I learned, the less idiotic they seemed.

There now follows the tale that ran around the media hothouse that is a 21st-century political conference. A Virgin train, it was said, had struck a cow. It had then taken two (some said three) hours before either that train, or the trains stacked up behind it, moved. The train stayed put. The cow stayed put. Nothing could happen until fit and proper persons were assembled to move the cow in a fit and proper manner. Pathetic. Jobsworths. Harrumph. How many railway operatives does it take to move a dead cow? Reader, steam hisses from your ears, perhaps, as it did from mine.

And many of the facts in this account were substantially true. Yet a story can be essentially true, but fail to make the case it seems to — as I found when I began a series of calls to Virgin Trains, Network Rail and the Association of Train Operating Companies. But let’s short-cut. I have Network Rail’s incident log, minus individuals’ names. I can do no better than summarise, translating (as best I can) some technical language.

27/09/10: 10.09 Call from driver of 09.27