Police run 'Ghost trains' in dead of night to track down Britain's metal thieves

Undercover police units are travelling on railways in the dead of night in an attempt to catch the surging number of scrap-metal thieves red-handed.

The locomotives – dubbed ghost trains – travel with their lights dimmed and their engines muffled to allow specialist officers, equipped with infrared cameras, to catch unsuspecting criminals in the act.

The tactic is aimed at countering the metal theft crimewave that has caused chaos for rail passengers. In the past seven months alone, 1,969 trains have been cancelled because of 675 copper cable thefts across the network.     More