The ultimate rail watchdog, the Office of Rail Regulation (ORR), is examining a bulky dossier compiled by an industry insider that suggests safety figures in the East Anglia region have been faked for up to three years.
The whistleblower alleges that at least 13 level crossings were wrongly recorded as "risk assessed" and that two Network Rail controllers had deliberately misled auditors over the sites they had inspected.
Last month a train collided with a sewage tanker near Sudbury, and 21 people were injured, just the latest in a string of collisions and near-misses in the region.
The whistleblower, who cannot be named for legal reasons, first made her concerns known to senior Network Rail managers. After the company made its own inquiries, one rail inspector was dismissed and another took early retirement. The whistleblower was also temporarily removed from her job. Now she has apparently bypassed the company and gone direct to ORR.
Network Rail's chief executive, Iain Coucher has consistently maintained that safety is his number one priority. A spokesman for Network Rail said it was unaware that a dossier had been passed to ORR, but said it would "comply fully" with any investigation.
Ale and hearty
Here is a bit of unqualified good news: instead of swigging the insipid cat's wee known as lager, British drinkers are turning back to proper beer. Sales of real ale last year rose from 20.4% to 20.6% of the market – a modest increase, to be sure, but the first recorded in 50 years.
At the same time, the number of real ale breweries has soared to more than 700, the most since the second world war and four times as many as in 1971, when the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) was founded. Camra has since become a national treasure. It campaigns loudly against the big brewers of fizz, and against the property companies masquerading as pub landlords.
Camra has tens of thousands of members, who decide which pubs should be listed in the beer fancier's bible, the Good Beer Guide.
As an added bonus, the slow recovery of real ale goes against the worrying national trend towards high-strength cheap lager, cider, and sweet, nasty so-called alcopops that are favoured by younger customers who go to the pub not to drink, but to get drunk.
Someone's gotta give
In its pants-wetting anxiety to slash public spending, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government has come up with a new wheeze for avoiding spending taxpayers' cash.
It is appealing to the nation's rich to fund cultural and other institutions, after the fashion of a grand and generous donation of £25m ($39m) to the British Museum from the Sainsbury family. The cash is in two tranches of £12.5m each, half from Lord Sainsbury's Linbury Trust (to be paid over three years) and the rest from the Monument Trust established by the peer's late brother.
It is a magnificent sum, certainly. Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary, called it "a fantastic example of the potential there is to boost philanthropy in the UK".
"We have got to get away from the British bashfulness about generosity and philanthropy." It would help even more, he did not add, if we got away from our bashfulness about making the rich pay their full taxes.
Boris saddles up
Boris Johnson, who has astonished political observers by failing to drop a major clanger in more than two years of being mayor of London, has announced that he will seek a second term in 2012. The announcement quashed rumours that BoJo, as he is sometimes known, would seek to return to the House of Commons to prepare a bid for the Conservative leadership.
Johnson, a tousle-haired old Etonian jolly japer, has developed a common touch since he was elected in 2008. His approval rating among London voters stands at 55%. That popularity could well be boosted if, as he has heavily hinted, he fights against spending cuts in the capital.
Already he has secured multibillion-pound funding for the Crossrail east-west project, a vital part of plans to improve the capital's transport infrastructure in advance of the 2012 Olympics.
Baths clean up
The Roman baths which gave the city of Bath its name have undergone a thorough but sensitive clean-up, which is fair enough, given that they have been around for almost 2,000 years. The Great Bath, at the heart of the complex, has been carefully scrubbed and cleaned by lasers, and "decluttered" to make it look roughly as the Romans would have seen it. Altogether, the work cost about £5.5m, which is a bargain considering that almost 900,00 people visit the baths each year, bringing with them £92m for the local economy.
The council-run attraction was not closed during renovations. Instead the work was carried out section by section over five years, and last year the ancient baths made a profit of £3.3m.
How able is Cable?
Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat business secretary, is one of the most trusted members of the coalition cabinet. With his reassuringly plain speech and avuncular manner, he has built a reputation for solid common sense and an ability to compromise when necessary.
Last week, however, good ol' Vince blotted his copybook not once, but twice. First, he infuriated the scientific community by announcing that academic research budgets would have to be cut and concentrated on areas with commercial potential. That approach, said his detractors acidly, would have disqualified most of the outstanding scientists in history, including Einstein.
Having comprehensively annoyed the boffins, Cable later turned his attention to Royal Mail, announcing that it would be fully privatised.
The move scandalised the postal unions. The unions have called for public funds to be invested in the service, which has been financially crippled by a vast and growing pension fund deficit.
The Prince of Rails
That Prince Charles has a wicked sense of humour. Last week he set out on an extensive nationwide tour, taking his message of environmental protection to the people who will one day be his subjects. It was, of course, quite impossible for him to take to the air, or to the motorways, to spread the word.
Instead Charles undertook his tour by rail, in an eight-carriage special royal train, hauled by a diesel locomotive fuelled by used cooking oil. In the wacky world of royalty, this passes for environmental sensitivity. And after all, the Prince wasn't on the train on his own. He was attended by a core team of 14, plus assorted flunkeys, the better to spread the green gospel.