Here’s your handy guide, plus some background
Over the years, references have been made in this column to various ‘Informed Sources’ Laws, but they haven’t been promulgated in full for a long time.
Perversely, the first to appear was the Third Law – ‘Always mistrust schedules based on the seasons’. This resulted from of years of reporting on the Advanced Passenger Train (APT), which was always going to enter revenue service ‘in the spring’ or ‘in the autumn’ but never ‘on 3 April’ or even ‘the first week in October’.
Even in the 21st century, tying deliveries of pretty well anything down to within a month is an achievement. One of ‘Informed Sources’ central missions is to hold delivery promises to account – and the Third Law rarely fails.
IRRATIONAL, CAPTAIN
Next came the First Law, also based on experience. The initial version was ‘Never assume that British Rail is a rational organisation’. Privatisation expanded the scope, and the general level, of irrational behaviour, so that the current version reads ‘Never assume railways are rational organisations’. And ‘railways’ includes those responsible for them, notably the Department for Transport.
Much hard-won experience is behind the Second Law which stat…
