BACK in 1979,

as a young industrial correspondent on London’s Evening Standard, I wrote the first British Rail ‘leaves on the line’ story. Trains delayed by ‘leaves on the line’ had been a regular joke for years in Frank Dickens’s brilliant cartoon strip in the Standard. Now the excuse was being trotted out for real. Ever since it’s been the same old story, as rail companies apologise for late running and cancellations during ‘the leaf fall period’ — what the rest of us call autumn. Now, hallelujah, they’ve finally found a solution. Maybe. A firm has invented a device that sprays sand on the tracks in front of the trains to stop them slipping on impacted leaves. It is described as ‘the biggest single step forward in adhesion management in the last 20 years’. Pity it’s taken 40-odd years to come up with the idea. Frank Dickens, who died aged 84 in 2016, would have enjoyed it. He’d probably have drawn a Bristow cartoon strip about trains being delayed because of ‘Sand on the line’.