If I got that right, media reports say that the Berlin S-Bahn – or actually its mother Deutsche Bahn AG lost over 17 Million Euro by cable theft – last year alone.
17 Million Euro of loss – through stolen cables? Wait a minute – let’s try to understand what that actually could mean: 17 Million Euro per year equals approximately 1.4 Million Euros per Month– or 46575,34 Euro per Day. And if you divide that through the price of copper (currenty 7.170,75 USD or 5438,98 Euro per ton) you would find out, that that sum equals 8,5 tons of copper per day – or 3215 tons of copper per year.
Now that is of course a made up calculation, lacking any connection to reality. I suggest Deutsche Bahn does not only relate to the market price of copper when publishing such numbers, but also to other costs emerging from cable theft.
Anyways. Now Deutsche Bahn and Berlin S-Bahn decided to try to prevent cable theft through various measures: under cover investigators, video drones, and marjing cables with “artifical DNA” are only three that were mentioned.
via Radio 1 / RBB (german)
www.rbb-online.de/wirtschaft/beitrag/2013/10/bahn-kaempft-gegen-metalldiebstahl.html