Crane controllers are awarded their own armlet. The term ‘OTP’ is redefined to include attachments and trailers. A machine controller can keep their eyes on more than one piece of OTP provided authority is buried in the method statement. Plant with a top speed over 20mph requires a headlight - no mention of whether it has to be lit.

Although OTP is a ‘train’ and used for engineering work, T9 informs us that it’s not an ‘engineering train’ (unless it’s a Thursday and the wind is from the south-west). Several collections of rules have been duplicated across different modules for no apparent reason and extra text is piled onto islands of existing clarity to fully gild the lily. You get the idea.

Handsignallers have been made redundant where protecting detonators are within 440 yards of points used for normal train movements. And, to prevent staff from dozing in the bushes, it’s been enshrined that drivers of on-track plant must sound a warning before moving their vehicle. I bet that prompted riotous debate on the Train Horns Steering Group (or ‘Mountains out of Molehills Committee’ as it was otherwise known).

Prior to consultation, the broad acres of the reworked Possession Arrangements Form had a degree of elegance, addressing known weaknesses with the present version. Evidently Stevie Wonder has since redesigned it, tearing user-suggested improvements from the page whilst adding spurious fonts and a loose array of randomly-sized boxes. It’s a triumph for the distinctly average.

One item of practical significance does loiter with intent. The time available to get a job done is often eaten into from both ends by the delivery and despatch of engineering trains. The revised rules will allow a possession to be given up around one train - lessening the impact of overruns - and taken around several. As more movements will be made under the protection of the signalling system, this change offers real safety benefits.

You do get a sense that the tail has wagged the dog here. June’s transformation serves two purposes - to formally endorse practices which are already commonplace and paper over known procedural cracks. The inquiry into last year’s derailment at Haymarket revealed confusion and complexity within T3, despite it flaunting the Plain English Campaign’s Crystal Mark. This is only bestowed on documents which can be “read, understood and acted upon by their intended audience”.

I now understand that the PEC was uneasy about the new-look Rule Book from the earliest stages of its involvement six years ago but received assurances that both content and style were appropriate for a typical, Sun-reading trackworker. Having being lead up the garden path, the campaign is keen to prevent the Rule Book’s flaws from tarnishing the Crystal Mark. It’s raising concerns with RSSB and, unless a way forward is found, it’s just possible that the ‘Plain English’ Rule Book could be stripped of this accolade. What a damning indictment that would be.