Cable Thefts on the Railways
New figures suggest that cable thefts on the railways are increasing dramatically, as they were up 52% between 2010-2011 and the previous year.
It would appear that the two main problems are the high price of scrap copper and the fact that many scrap yards give cash back on a no-questions-asked basis!
I always remember some work I did with British Rail about twenty years ago, where we were analysing signal faults on one particular main line. There the copper cables had een exchanged for fibre-optic ones and we found that most breakages occurred because of over-zealous track gangs over-tamping the ballast between the track. My software, Daisy, showed that in one area they didn’t occur at the same rate and the better performance was due to some members of the track gang knowing about signalling. So that problem was solved by better training of the gangs.
However, in one area we found that there were a large number of incidents of deliberately-cut fibre optic cables. This area had been a particularly bad area for the theft of cables and it turned out the thieves were cutting the cables in the vain hope that they would be replaced with stealable copper.
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The Anonymous Widower 
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