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'Stealing Like Magpies': Spike in Metal Theft Imperils German Railways

Business travelers and pushing their way through the subway station at Cologne Bonn Airport is intercepted at the escalators to the slopes by the security staff of Deutsche Bahn, the German supplier of the national railway. No, the officers inform the passengers, no trains run at the moment. And no, they do not know when operations resume. Palpable frustration and boredom spread through the crowd.

It was Tuesday morning last week, and in this case, the delay was not caused by a train down at high speed ICE. It wasn't a faulty railroad switch, the private drama of a suicide on the tracks or a bomb threat. And yet, it was an attack of sorts.

During the night, unknown individuals tampered with a cable shaft between the Cologne districts of Kalk and Vingst, near a city forest called the Gremberger Wäldchen, destroying three signaling cables and a communications cable with an axe. Federal police, in their subsequent report, put the time of the attack at 1:25 a.m.

Investigators concluded that these were not vandals, but cable thieves. Perhaps they were interrupted, because they never finished their work, but the damage they caused was still enough to bring rail traffic around Cologne to a standstill for 11 hours, cancelling 42 trains and rerouting 56.

Rising Metal Prices Drive Scrap Market

Hardly a day goes by without the theft of copper cable, iron mast anchors or even entire lengths of tracks somewhere along Germany's 34,000 kilometers (21,000 miles) of railway lines.

Last year, federal police recorded over 2,700 cases of iron and non-ferrous metal theft. Deutsche Bahn (DB) lost 347,294 kilograms (765,652 pounds) of copper this way, 675,570 kilograms (1,489,377 pounds) of steel, 2,399 kilograms (5,289 pounds) of aluminum and 1,185,748 kilograms (2,614,127 pounds) of other metals such as brass, bronze and gunmetal.

The numbers are increasing, too. The first four months of this year alone saw more than 1,400 cases of theft, with the cost to DB amounting to millions of euros. The damage train cancellations cause to the company's image, meanwhile, can't be quantified in numbers, and company leaders are growing nervous.

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