ACU            Thievery has always been with us

When I worked for London Transport I was told a couple of stories that related to some thievery that took place shortly after the war.  For people who are not familiar with the tube, I must point out that there is probably more overground track than there is underground.  The overground track is similar to the Southern Railway track except that there are two live rails instead of the one that Southern Railway use.  Most metro services around the world have similar overground parts of their system and are probably at risk of similar thievery.  At the side of the track there are short poles that have cable-hangers.  The cables are for the power that feeds the track as well as other things like telephone cables.  I believe that some of the telephone cables belonged to Post Office Telephones (now British Telecom).

In the austerity times I talk about, scrap metal was at a premium and fetched very high prices.  Everybody has heard stories of church roofs being stripped of lead sheet to be sold as scrap.  Scrap copper fetched even higher prices.  The telephone cables were hardly worth nicking as there was more insulation than copper, although during the war in Bushy  Park a length of newly buried telephone cable got nicked one night, presumable for its copper content.  There seemed to have been no check on the scrap metal merchants, who may have been in cahoots with the thieves.

This particular robbery must have been an inside job, as the power was switched off between about one AM and four AM.  A half mile length of cable disappeared sometime during the shut-down period.  When the track was re-powered in the morning ready for the first train to run, one section was dead, and the train just coasted to a standstill when it reached that section that should have been powered  --  but wasn't!

My storyteller didn't know a lot of the details because he worked for the trolleybus part of the business, as did I.  But we deduced a few facts from simple common sense, and knowledge of the overall distribution system.  There wouldn't have been a standby supply.  The train would have left the depot under power, and as it crossed into the dead section the motorman would have expected there to be continuous power.  He was probably unaware of him leaving one section and moving into the next section.  How long it took for him to report the failure of the supply, I don't know.  He would probably have got out of his cab and walked to the nearest trackside telephone, and for the controller on the other end of the telephone, it was probably the first he knew of the interruption..  Any fare-paying passengers would have had a bad day that day.

We reckoned that there would have been a lot of overtime worked that week.
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The second story of thievery took place at a substation that I worked in.  The building was on the Chiswick High Road just below Stamford Brook Station on the map.  Passers-by would have been unaware that there was a substation in that position, but that was the case with most of the trolleybus substations.  Very inconspicuous buildings.

In the very early days the building was a power station, but had been turned into a trolleybus substation.  When I worked there in the 50s, the switchgear was still rather archaic, but some of the gear was quite modern.   My story took place when the building was being modernised and, again, refers to that expensive metal: copper.

This update was part of a larger project and I expect that the value of scrap copper made LTE a profit.  They won in both directions.  The Victorians were extravagant with copper, and the system would run quite satisfactorily with a lot less metal than was installed.  The spare metal was sold by the LTE to fund a lot of new work.

A large pile of scrap copper busbar was brought out of the building in readiness for the London Transport truck to pick it up.  The truck was expected at 10:30 AM but arrived 45 minutes early (or so the fitters believed).  The correct truck arrived on time; the earlier one had been nicked to order and the load of scrap copper just evaporated.  What the haul would have been worth is anybody's guess.  It is almost certain that the police would have been involved, as it was obviously another inside job.
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On the subject of thievery, I saw a small book a number of years ago that listed some of the odd things that have been stolen around the globe.  One that I remember was of a steel bridge that was nicked in a remote part of the USA.  The disappearance of the bridge was only noticed when someone wanted to drive across it to a small island.

There is a lot less thievery on that scale in the Muslim world, as there is a lot less general crime in that part of the world.  The penalties are so draconian that few people risk getting caught.  Refer to my story of my ten months working in Syria.  Things like muggings just didn't happen.

What crime must cost the public purse in the West is not recorded.  If it were maybe we would all become Muslims.  If only they (the Muslim world) were to modernise in other ways, they would become the world leaders, as the Semites are, to my judgement, the cleverest people in the main.