{"id":256728,"date":"2025-07-25T16:42:33","date_gmt":"2025-07-25T06:42:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.railfreight.com\/?p=64471"},"modified":"2025-07-25T16:42:33","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T06:42:33","slug":"opinion-crime-remains-freights-looming-headache","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/?p=256728","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: Crime remains freight\u2019s looming headache"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Across the Atlantic, crime on the rails has become almost cinematic in scale. The ransacking of intermodal trains moving through Los Angeles, reported by RailFreight.com in 2022, saw thieves brazenly raiding moving trains, scattering packaging like confetti along the tracks. Drone footage showed scenes reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic heist: hundreds of open containers, shredded parcels, and abandoned goods. Don\u2019t let it happen here, says RailFreight.com UK Editor Simon Walton.<\/strong><br \/>\n<span id=\"more-64471\"><\/span><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s easy to look at that from a British perspective and think: \u201cIt couldn\u2019t happen here, could it? After all, the days of the Great Train Robbery are behind us. Consigned, if not to history, then to cultural folklore. Our railways in utopian Britain are modern, secured, policed. They don\u2019t suffer from theft, vandalism, crime. Well, here\u2019s an alarm bell ringing, and it&#8217;s more than a wake-up call.<\/p>\n<h2>Off the rails, but not off the radar<\/h2>\n<p>Perhaps only because the kind of high-value, high-risk cargo that tempted Ronnie Biggs and company has largely been pushed off the rails. Parcels, mail, and high-street retail goods are now much more likely to move by road. There&#8217;s a creeping suspicion that crime might not have disappeared. It may just have changed tracks. It doesn\u2019t take Sherlock Holmes to work out that elementary fact.<\/p>\n<div class=\"youtube-container\" style=\"height:0;overflow:hidden;padding-bottom:56.25%;position:relative;width:100%;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-embed\" style=\"bottom:0;height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;right:0;top:0;width:100%;\" width=\"960\" height=\"540\" src=\"https:\/\/youtube.com\/embed\/VsipYHlah6s?rel=0&amp;autoplay=0&amp;mute=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"accelerrometer; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p>A handful of ambitious operators like Varamis Rail have been trying to return time-sensitive logistics, parcels and high-value express cargo, to rail. Their high-speed electric services promise agility and low emissions. With those trains operating at 100 miles per hour (160km\/h), they\u2019re hardly an easy target for thieves. That said, Varamis appears to have slipped into hiatus, and the future of express rail freight in the UK remains uncertain.<\/p>\n<h2>NavCIS: Special Victims Unit<\/h2>\n<p>In the meantime, the bulk of British freight continues to roll in containers. Steel boxes on steel wheels seem an impregnable combination. It has long been assumed that such traffic is secure. Intermodal operations are perceived as less susceptible to pilferage than road haulage, which is plagued by theft from parked trucks, insecure lay-bys, and criminal gangs skilled at slicing curtain-siders.<\/p>\n<p>So frequent are these road-related thefts that an entire police unit has been created to tackle them. The <a href=\"https:\/\/navcis.police.uk\/\"  rel=\"noopener\">National Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service<\/a> (NaVCIS) is one of the few remaining examples of direct public-private cooperation in freight security. Funded entirely by industry, NaVCIS Freight monitors and investigates cargo thefts, building intelligence that otherwise might be missed by conventional policing. Now, NaVCIS has its eyes on the rails.<\/p>\n<h2>A Quiet Place for a Quiet Crime Part Two<\/h2>\n<p>Speaking to Friday Freight Path, Mike Dawber, Field Intelligence Officer for NaVCIS\u2019s Freight Desk, described rail freight theft as an \u201cunder-reported and under-recognised\u201d threat. It&#8217;s not about armed gangs or masked robbers. It\u2019s subtle, silent, and often invisible until the point of delivery.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe had a case about 18 months ago,\u201d says Dawber, \u201cwhere containers carrying alcohol were being pilfered. A 40-foot box would be missing one or two pallets by the time it reached its destination, out of maybe thirty inside. Hard to detect. But repeated over ten containers, that\u2019s a significant theft.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The culprits had gone a step further: replacing tampered seals with convincing counterfeits. At a glance, everything looked intact. The thefts were only discovered once the cargo arrived abroad. Short-shipped and short-changed. \u201cIt turned into a bit of a bun fight,\u201d Dawber adds in a turn of typical British understatement. \u201cThere was no visible evidence of theft, so many of the losses were simply written off, masked from the statistics.\u201d<\/p>\n<figure style=\"max-width: 100%; margin: 20px auto; border-radius: 6px; overflow: hidden; box-shadow: 0 2px 8px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1);\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"fluid alignnone\" style=\"width: 100%; height: auto; display: block;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.railfreight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Specialist-equipment-used-to-clear-fly-tipping-in-Stalybridge.jpg\" alt=\"The amenity disaster of fly-tipping. Specialist equipment used to clear the mess (Network Rail)\" width=\"960\" height=\"540\" \/><figcaption style=\"padding: 10px 15px; font-size: 14px; background: #f8f8f8; text-align: left; color: #555;\">The amenity disaster of fly-tipping. Specialist equipment used to clear the mess. Image: \u00a9 Network Rail<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Seal compromise, he points out, is a global issue, which includes Britain. Just because rail freight is harder to access doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s immune. As Mike Dawber puts it: \u201cGo into any motorway service station and you\u2019ll see discarded seals and packaging. It\u2019s happening right under our noses.\u201d There\u2019s no guarantee either that those seals didn\u2019t come from containers that had spent part of their journey behind a \u201966 on the rails of Britain.<\/p>\n<p>Mike Dawber would know. He had a call scheduled with colleagues in Texas the same day, discussing transatlantic cargo theft patterns. It&#8217;s an ancient problem, he says, half-laughing, half resigned to a long haul against the criminals who target goods in transit.\u201cOne of my students once did a thesis on cargo theft from Roman roads.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In 2018, NaVCIS estimated the average value of a cargo theft at \u00a330,000 (\u20ac36,000). While UK rail terminals and ports are generally secure, Dawber warns that it&#8217;s the \u201clast mile\u201d where vulnerabilities emerge, especially once goods are loaded for onward road travel.<\/p>\n<h2>A North American Warning<\/h2>\n<p>At the Freight Fraud Symposium in Dallas earlier this year, industry and law enforcement convened to discuss the worrying escalation of freight crime in the US. There, they dissected the anatomy of modern supply chain crime: phishing, catfishing, double brokering, identity fraud, cargo theft, and insider abuse. If these terms are unfamiliar, then rest unassured, they are the language of the criminals, and they are fluent.<\/p>\n<p>The scale of rail freight in North America dwarfs the UK, but the tactics are increasingly borderless. The symposium covered the latest in cargo crime countermeasures\u2014from forensic tagging and tracking to digital verification of hauliers. British operators should be paying close attention.<\/p>\n<h2>The worst response is complacency<\/h2>\n<p>Right now, trains in the UK aren\u2019t being ransacked, but that&#8217;s not to say UK rail is free from crime. Most criminal attention focuses elsewhere. Easier, but no less costly for the victims are road cargo, copper cabling, and the scourge of graffiti.<\/p>\n<p>Metal theft, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.railfreight.com\/railfreight\/2022\/05\/18\/cable-theft-in-south-yorkshire-endangers-freight-and-passenger-operations\/\"  rel=\"noopener\">particularly of copper cabling<\/a>, continues to plague the British network. The West Coast Main Line, Europe\u2019s busiest mixed traffic route, has been a hotspot, prompting the deployment of covert drones and &#8220;DNA beads&#8221;\u2014traceable liquid tags designed to link thieves to stolen metal. The damage from such thefts can disrupt not just WCML services, both freight and passenger, but the whole network. For freight flows that means particularly time-critical intermodal runs. No groceries in Newtonmore because of some cable blagger in Newton-le-Willows.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"max-width: 100%; margin: 20px auto; border-radius: 6px; overflow: hidden; box-shadow: 0 2px 8px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1);\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"fluid alignnone\" style=\"width: 100%; height: auto; display: block;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.railfreight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/Cable-theft-BTP-960.jpg\" alt=\"A British Transport Police officer showing what thieves do to vital railway systems (BTP)\" width=\"960\" height=\"640\" \/><figcaption style=\"padding: 10px 15px; font-size: 14px; background: #f8f8f8; text-align: left; color: #555;\">A British Transport Police officer showing what thieves do to vital railway systems Image: \u00a9 BTP<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Meanwhile, graffiti continues to scar freight rolling stock. Taggers may be \u201cartists\u201d in their own minds, but their handiwork often forces wagons out of service for deep cleaning, incurring direct costs and reducing network capacity. There\u2019s a code among the graffitieratti. Don&#8217;t cover safety or ID markings, so the railways won\u2019t remove the tags. But that doesn\u2019t make it acceptable, or victimless. The rail industry spends around \u00a33.5 million (\u20ac4.15m) annually on graffiti removal. The economic impact in London alone is said <a href=\"https:\/\/www.railtech.com\/all\/2025\/07\/23\/tfl-boss-suggests-anti-graffiti-vigilantes-could-be-tagging-trains-themselves\/\"  rel=\"noopener\">to exceed \u00a3100 million (\u20ac118m)<\/a>. Add to that trespass, fly tipping and outright attacks on trains and the costs soon spiral.<\/p>\n<p>CCTV, video analytics, cloud-based security systems, and motion-triggered warnings are being rolled out, especially at sidings and depots. One such system\u2014Optex\u2019s CHeKT\u2014uses AI and LiDAR to detect intruders and deliver real-time alerts. It\u2019s a glimpse of a high-tech future where freight crime is stopped before it starts.<\/p>\n<h2>Breaching the \u2018Broken Windows\u2019 threshold<\/h2>\n<p>There\u2019s a theory in urban policing called the &#8220;broken windows&#8221; approach. Ignoring small-scale vandalism and disorder leads to bigger crimes. Could the same logic apply to the rail network? Empirical evidence suggests that\u2019s the case. Graffiti, copper theft, and trespass are just the visible symptoms of a deeper vulnerability.<\/p>\n<p>If we tolerate these low-level intrusions, we open the door to larger threats, perhaps even <a href=\"https:\/\/www.railfreight.com\/railfreight\/2022\/01\/20\/massive-theft-of-packages-from-trains-in-los-angeles\/\"  rel=\"noopener\">cargo theft on the scale seen in North America<\/a>. That\u2019s a question worth asking. While freight trains in Britain may not be under siege today, the tracks of tomorrow could tell a different story. If we&#8217;re not alert, equipped, and serious about security and lawlessness, we might just see the Great Train Robbery shunt back out of folklore and onto a railway near you. That\u2019s a picture no one wants to see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Across the Atlantic, crime on the rails has become almost cinematic in scale. The ransacking of intermodal trains moving through Los Angeles, reported by RailFreight.com\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":1,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[921,17545,11313,17546,17547,56,47,17548,85],"tags":[12634],"class_list":["post-256728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-crime","category-friday-freight-path","category-in-depth","category-mike-dawber","category-navcis","category-opinion","category-rail-news","category-simon-walton","category-uk","tag-railfreight"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=256728"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256728\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258038,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256728\/revisions\/258038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=256728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=256728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=256728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}