There goes the copper thief....

[Kogut]

six months? So it is do hard to replace single cable? And stealing raliway tracks is even more dangerous (yes, it happened).

[JamieLei]

I always wondered why they left spare rail lying in the middle of the track... - so easy for someone to come along at night and pinch it.

[Ameecher]

I always wondered why they left spare rail lying in the middle of the track... - so easy for someone to come along at night and pinch it.

Usually because the effort/cost of removal negates the value of removing it.It's also sometimes used for spot repairs, saves having to trip in a single stretch of rail, not something that can easily be done via road and not everywhere is in easy reach of a road access point.

[Badger]

The cable cutters were out last night at Bentley Junction (between Doncaster and Kirk Sandall on the Don - Hull/Scunthorpe lines), making 14 seperate cuts through various cables effecting signalling and point-work, causing continous delays as trains had to be talked past 2 signals in one direction and one in the other.

[JGR]

Running copper cables immediately adjacent to the 3rd rail or the live overhead lines would be no good, as the inductive effects would kill the SNR dead.
Might well work for fibre optic lines though.

Frankly there's not much that they can do at a reasonable cost, short of offering bounties to scrap merchants who the thieves try to sell stolen lines to.
You can't make something un-stealable, especially when it has to cover such a large, unguarded area.

[Kevo00]

Yet more disruption caused due to this last night on SWT. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-13726803

This is such a severe problem now, you'd wonder if perhaps its an inside job of some sort.

[doktorhonig]

six months? So it is do hard to replace single cable?

There was a lot of damage in that area. The problem was, that they did not notice the missing cable - it was probably stolen long ago. They had to build a new signal tower after it burned down.
Here's an article: bad google translation.
They mention delays of 30 minutes there, but that was a bit too optimistic.

[Jacko]

this is getting silly. I cant believe how long and were these delays keep happening, what they should do, is have cameras there, then when a thief comes up, Police Drive in, catch him, and then put the cable back straight away and arrest the evil little f*******

[orudge]

Could they not look at using a wireless system in the future? As I understand it, does ETCS Level 2 not use GSM-R for this purpose? While I realise overhauling all our existing railways to use this would be expensive and take forever, it seems it might be worth doing if it can reduce the amount of copper signalling cable required, and therefore reducing the problems caused when people try to nick it all!

[JGR]

Radio systems have a bucket-load of problems and extra costs that just running a few wires don't.
Equipping every (or even some) signals with a transmitter/receiver module would be expensive, and getting them to work in such a noisy environment would be a pain and prone to reliability issues.
Wouldn't be long before the thieves just start nicking the power cables or radio modules instead either :\

[Jacko]

Power them with 3rd rail or Overhead.... problem solved!

[Geo Ghost]

How on earth would that work? Then it's sending DC and AC power down the signalling lines instead of transmissions. Surely that would, quite literally, blow the system

There must be a good solution to it. Or something that doesn't involve 10ft high-security fencing anyway.

[JGR]

Power them with 3rd rail or Overhead.... problem solved!

3rd rail and overhead are incredibly noisy, and generally at the wrong voltage for powering trackside equipment. Though there are (cumbersome) ways of getting round that.
Also, you generally want the signals to work even if the track power is turned off.

You can transmit data down the rails however, but the maximum bitrate is laughably low.

Fibre-optic systems are probably the easiest solution for data. Solves the noise problem too.
The signals, etc still need powering though.

[Dezeero]

Yet more disruption caused due to this last night on SWT. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-13726803

Indeed. One of our West-Of-England trains Left Waterloo at 19:27 and reached Exeter at 03:19

...and yet I still enjoy my job

[Badger]

Yet more disruption caused due to this last night on SWT. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-13726803

Indeed. One of our West-Of-England trains Left Waterloo at 19:27 and reached Exeter at 03:19

...and yet I still enjoy my job

Pretty epic fail on that! But at least I understand what goes on behind the scenes!

[Kevo00]

There was plenty of anger in the blogosphere about it too - http://mulqueeny.wordpress.com/2011/06/ ... st-trains/. Seems like SWT need to at least employ some staff with some people skills for when these things happen. I know we don't condone rail trespassing on this site, but who can blame people for trying to escape from trains in a situation like that? This wasn't SWT's fault, but that doesn't seem to me to be an adequate excuse for treating passengers that pay you a lot of money every year like crap.

Edit: Also a good post by a man who's heavily pregnant wife was stranded on a train - yet station staff threatened him with arrest when he tried to complain. http://www.slightlyrightofcentre.com/20 ... ident.html

[Jacko]

this is pathetic, SWT constantly screwing up, and yet you also see the uselessness of about 99% of our police force! there were several of them guarding the trains to stop people from trespassing, when they could have a few there escorting them, and have everyone else catch the little s*** who caused the problem in the first place! People sshould understand when others are waiting, after about 4 hours they're going to be pretty p***ed off!

[Chris]

this is pathetic, SWT constantly screwing up, and yet you also see the uselessness of about 99% of our police force! there were several of them guarding the trains to stop people from trespassing, when they could have a few there escorting them, and have everyone else catch the little s*** who caused the problem in the first place! People sshould understand when others are waiting, after about 4 hours they're going to be pretty p***ed off!

Well assumably, it is 3rd rail, and so having a whole trainload of passengers walking over the tracks isn't very desirable.

[Jacko]

it is 3rd rail and yes they should have been a bit more careful, but i think after an hour, what should have happened, he passengers tell the guard, he communicates with network rail or whoever presses the on/off button to switch the rails off for about 40 minutes while everything is sorted out.

[Ameecher]

Lol at the on/off button.

You can't just switch off one track, you have to shut down a whole feeder station which will stop every train in the area so for the sake of 400 stranded passengers do you want to balls the rest of it up as well?