Located in the heart of the Aegean Sea, the picturesque island of Paros has recently captured the hearts of travellers worldwide, thanks to its starring role in the smash hit Netflix drama One Day.
13.02.2024 - 00:07 / euronews.com / Deutsche Bahn
Copper theft is delaying thousands of trains and causing millions of euro worth of damage to rail infrastructure across Europe.
You may wonder why thieves stealing a metal could be so significant as to stop trains from running. Well, because trains can’t run at all without copper.
It is the essential component in things like signal cables, grounding wires and power lines. Without them, trains don’t have the power or communications to run.
One tonne could be sold to a metal recycling facility in the UK for around £6,600 (€7,726) last March, according to a UK All-Party Parliamentary Group report on metal theft. While thieves might not be able to sell stolen goods to an official recycling site, they are likely to at more informal scrap yards.
With the price of copper predicted to rise in the next two years, rail operators are concerned that copper theft will become yet more popular.
They are looking to increase their defences and several European countries have even been employing DNA technology to beat the thieves.
So just how big of a problem is copper theft on Europe’s railways and what exactly can we do to stop it?
The scale of the problem is revealed by the data from some of the continent’s biggest train operators.
The appetite for copper led to British trains being delayed for 84,390 minutes in the 2022/23 financial year at a cost of £12.24 million (€14.33 million), figures released to Euronews Travel by Network Rail show.
In Germany, there were 450 cases of metal theft on Deutsche Bahn-operated railways, a spokesperson for the train company told us. This affected 3,200 trains which were delayed for a total of 40,000 minutes and cost Deutsche Bahn €7 million.
France operator SNCF told us that more than 40,000 trains were affected by metal theft in their most recent figures from 2022, causing over €20 million in losses.
Belgium’s railways were also affected and saw 466 acts of copper theft in 2022, which was a 300 per cent increase compared to 2021 and led to 33,000 minutes of delays.
But not every country is struggling with this problem. A spokesperson for Austrian operator ÖBB told Euronews: “Last year, we recorded copper thefts in the low single-digit range throughout Austria, which did not cause any disruption to train services.”
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While the numbers involved are significant, they have decreased massively over the last 10-15 years. Deutsche Bahn says cases have fallen by around 85 per cent in Germany from 3,200 in 2013 to 450 in 2023.
But tackling the crime has its challenges.
Rail tracks and infrastructure are of course spread out across countries and go through remote areas. This makes it difficult to monitor and to catch thieves in action.
In recent years, companies
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