CIVIL ENGINEERING & CONSTRUCTION


“Traditionally, cables have been stolen by attaching them to a vehicle and pulling them out – that becomes impossible with this because you take all the cable concrete troughing with it, which stops the cables coming out. It’s also very, very diffi cult to cut the bands – it means that the cable thieves have to be on site longer, and there- fore they’re more vulnerable to detection and apprehension. And the biggest point of all is that it keeps the cables intact – if they’re intact, services keep running and costs are kept low, which is a good thing.”


Farnsworth himself had a key role in insti- tuting that particular innovation.


He said: “What we’ve traditionally done to prevent vandalism on cable troughing has been to use a steel band to band the lid of the trough and the body of the trough, and that stops the schoolchildren and other vandals because they tend to use just what comes to hand at site and they can’t get through that.


“Unfortunately, cable thieves can and will cut their way through, so steel bands aren’t going to present a particular problem. So, in seeking to fi nd a way to actually secure the cables to the troughs, and rather than using a drill and drilling holes in and put- ting some form of securing device in, it sud- denly occurred to me that if we put a steel band around the upright wall of the trough and a second steel band around that and around the bundle of cables, then that locks them in place (see pictures, above left).


“You can vary that, based on the perceived threat of the area, by changing the frequen- cy of the bands: whether it’s every trough, every second, every third, etc, and obvious- ly you can control costs and offer value for money in that way as well.”


Alarm


Other solutions have been more about digital innovation than physical design, especially those based around sensor technology.


Farnsworth said: “We have now instituted some motion sensors, also known as cable trembler alarms, which act as a physical deterrent. These can be placed on cables inside the troughing route and you can’t see them until you take the lid off the trough.”


Clarke added: “You can put them on access points too, so that when the offenders come in to try to steal the cable, we detect them early, then a message is sent to our control centre, so that BTP and Network Rail staff can be on site very quickly to hopefully try to interrupt the potential theft.”


Farnsworth continued: “Another new one is CCTV over IP with video analytics – it’s fair to say that’s at a fairly immature level at the moment but we are looking at that and bringing in IP-based CCTV cameras.


“Probably the largest innovation of the lot is the acoustic fi bre sensing system, which is a system which takes an optical fi bre and turns it into an acoustic microphone. It de- tects vibration close to the cable route and leads it back to central control, which then analyses what the vibration is and registers that against a library of known vibrations and sounds. If it turns out to be, for exam- ple, a characteristic sound of foot on ballast or troughing being tampered with or cable being played with (which would all be dif- ferent characteristic sounds) it will alarm, and within a few minutes there will be a re- sponse on site by security personnel.


“Network Rail is just fi nishing installing a brand new optical fi bre network basically over all of its 16,000km, and these cables are, or certainly can be, used as a platform for this system. The aspiration is, in the long term, to have everything protected with these systems.”


Anyone can see the advantages of such a system, which negates the traditional dis- advantage facing Network Rail and the police of the sheer size of the rail network and rail estate that has to be monitored and protected.


Predict and provide


Looking to the future and other tech- nologies on the horizon, Farnsworth said: “We’re at the stage now where we have a clear idea of where we want to go; we’ve done brainstorming exercises and apart from the technologies that get introduced to us through our innovation process on the website, we’re pretty clear now that we know what’s out there and what we can use.


“What we want to do is get to the point where we are stable and we can give the routes a toolkit that includes all of the vari- ous options that they can mix and match


depending on what they’re trying to protect and where. Obviously route conditions vary throughout the country.”


Railway crime does come in various fl a- vours – as Chief Superintendent Miles Flood of British Transport Police explains on page 48 – but cable theft does remain the major problem for Network Rail when it comes to deliberate criminal acts.


As detailed in Rail Technology Magazine and the national press, it really is a huge and growing problem - in 2008/09 it cost an estimated £12m, 2009/10 £13m, and in 2010/11 £16m, based on the cost of com- pensating TOCs, replacing cable, attend- ing to the fault and the opportunity cost of diverting labour from elsewhere to deal with it. In the fi rst three months of this year there were 271 thefts, causing 116,000 minutes delay and costing £4,350,000 in compensation. Any industry dealing with a crime costing it nearly £50m in little more than three years would know it has to take action across multiple fronts to deal with it.


Clarke, who has special responsibility for cable theft, told us: “The engineering side is not the be all and end all: there are obvi- ously other issues that we’re looking at too, including changes to the law for metal deal- ers and other people who sell scrap metal, the education side of it, the enforcement side of it, and so on. But the engineering side is important and we have to try to re- duce crime though this, so we’re going to try to do everything we possibly can.”


Farnsworth concluded: “It looks like the cost of copper is generally creeping up- wards. In terms of engineering, we’re en- suring that the measures we put in place to- day will be suffi cient, or we hope will be suf- fi cient, to deter or prevent cable theft when copper reaches £20,000 a tonne - a fi gure I’ve heard mentioned in the past. So what we’re doing today has to be good enough for tomorrow and good enough to prevent even hardened thieves from stealing cables.”


FOR MORE INFORMATION


Visit www.networkrail.co.uk/aspx/12000.aspx rail technology magazine Aug/Sep 11 | 47


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