EoW July 2011

There’s nothing worse than travelling and nding your trip delayed. Whether it be roadworks, delays because of foreign air tra c strikes, or more pertinently these days, train journeys interrupted by thieves stealing cables from the rail network. It’s easy to see that the thieves are after making a quick buck when copper is selling at £6,200 per tonne. (January 2011). However, they receive only a pittance from the copper and the cost of the repairs will, inevitably, be passed on to the train user. An example of this is that two Newark, Nottinghamshire, UK, men stole just a fewmetres of signallingcable fromthemainEdinburgh toLondon line. They got £44 each for their e orts – and three years in prison once they had been caught. The other side to this was that that single theft caused delays to more than 100 trains, chaos to the travellers and landed Network Rail with a £75,000 bill to make the repairs. All that for £44! Network Rail suggests that cable thefts from its lines has cost somewhere in the region of £35m during the last four years. There is a spin o from this as well. It seems crooks – sometimes organised gangs of them – are targeting electricity, gas connections and telephone wires as well in their hunger for copper. It is therefore refreshing to see the police and rail networks joining forces in a bid to beat the criminals (Stopping the cable thieves, page 9). That clampdown has had to come. The use of SmartWater to trap the thieves nally gives Getting Smart in the fight against the copper criminals

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the authorities the evidence they need to stop these thefts. Let us hope the courts hand down severe enough justice to deter them even more.

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EuroWire – July 2011