NETWORK Rail has been landed with a £700,000 bill after thieves tore out trackside signal cables and disrupted rail services between Oxfordshire and London last week.

The company’s top manager in the Thames Valley and western England, Chris Rayner, told the Oxford Mail: “The incident at Tilehurst cost us £700,000 in one day. A lot of money is being lost due to this kind of incident.”

He added: “The cost of cable is peanuts. The cost of the delays, in compensation [paid to train operators whose services are disrupted] and staff to make repairs, is immense.”

Mr Rayner, the rail infrastructure firm’s western route director, said security measures were being stepped up and added: “These crimes mean we have to spend money where we would rather not spend it, frankly, but we can’t afford to have services stopped again for an afternoon or a morning while we’re out repairing cables.”

And he warned that the thieves, who often target 650-volt trackside power cables to sell the copper wiring for scrap, were risking death or serious injury.

He said: “We need to emphasise just how dangerous this is.

“The number of thieves we’ve had killed or severely burned over the past few years on the railways is incredible.

“If half of them knew the risk they were running, either by cutting cables, or being run down by trains, they might think twice.”

The theft on Friday, August 6, was the second such incident at Tilehurst, west of Reading, in just three days, while on June 23, a 300ft section of cable was torn out alongside the Great Western main line in west London, again causing major disruption to trains for much of the day.

Phone users in Eynsham have also suffered at the hands of the thieves recently, with hundreds of homes and businesses cut off after almost a mile of cable was torn out of ducts on July 26.

Mr Rayner said that Network Rail and British Transport Police were working on a series of measures to deter and detect the thieves.

All new cable installed on the rail system is marked so it can be easily identified. And Mr Rayner added: “We’re looking at redesigning signal cable specially, so it’s just not economic to steal it, so that it will be so hard to melt it down that nobody bothers.”

And he had a warning for scrap dealers who are channelling the stolen copper out of the country: “They had better watch out if they’re dealing in it illegally, because we hold them responsible as much as we hold the thieves responsible.”

Mr Rayner said: “We’re absolutely determined to see this problem off.”

Oxfordshire County Council leader Keith Mitchell suggested in his blog on the council’s website this week that the cable thieves should be put in the stocks so rail commuters whose journeys were disrupted could pelt them with rotten fruit.

  • Rewards of up to £1,000 are on offer for information leading to the conviction of cable thieves. Anyone with information should call British Transport Police on 0800 405040 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555111.