The price of copper may be falling, but the increasingly brazen and aggressive thieves who are stealing it from train lines appear not to have noticed.
While investors in the highly-conductive metal feel the pinch after it lost nearly a quarter of its value in September, the biggest drop since the financial crisis of 2008, incidents of cable theft on the rail network are reaching record highs.
The latest figures show that incidents of cable theft could be up as much as 52 per cent in 2011/12 compared to two years ago.
Now Network Rail is admitting that the crime may be more organised than it first believed - and some are doubting that there's anything they can do short of praying for snow this winter to stop thieves in their tracks.
Cable theft might seem like an old-fashioned crime, but it is really in the last five years that the crime has taken hold of the UK transport network.
At first it was rural and more isolated areas in the North East - where your chances of being hit by an oncoming train are generally lower - that were hit hardest by the crooks.
But lately the areas targeted by thieves have included busy urban lines including those near London Bridge, where in one incident in September < a href="http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23985010-two-arrested-over-copper-cable-theft-which-caused-massive-travel-chaos.do">more than 10,000 people's journeys were disrupted after the theft of signal cables cancelled 146 trains and delayed 840 others.
Most recently in Rainham, Essex, cable thieves disrupted the journeys of hundreds more people on Friday morning.
And it's not just rail networks that have been hit. Internet and phone lines, energy networks and virtually any business that uses copper wires have been attacked in every greater numbers in recent months.
More than 500 incidents of cable theft have been reported to Network Rail in the first six months of the 2011/12 financial year. That's up from 996 for the whole of last year, and 656 in 2009/10.
The cost to Network Rail of these incidents have also risen dramatically.
So far this year the rail operator has paid out £5.9 million to train operators in compensation for cancelled trains. The total cost to Network Rail was £10.9m in 2009/10, and £12m in 2010/11.
"It's becoming a more endemic problem for the railway, and it's certainly escalating," said Network Rail spokesperson Rachel Lowe.
"We've always said that cable theft is about 80 per cent opportunist thieves and 20 per cent organised. There is a concern that might be now."
Network Rail is working with British Transport Police (BTP) to try and combat the problem. They have paid for extra officers, attempted to make the wires more difficult to steal by adding CCTV to lines.
Officers also say that they are working with government to find new measures to "choke off the market" for stolen metal, and in 2011 have set up a newly streamlined approach to cable theft known as Operation Leopard.
BTP say that between January and August 2011 29 people had been convicted on cable theft-related charges, including two men who were jailed after they sold cables stolen from a substation near Penge even after one of their grip was fatally electrocuted in the raid.
More recently Network Rail have introduced new cables which are easier for scrap metal merchants to identity.
Unfortunately that depends on scrupulous scrap metal merchants not accepting cables of unknown origin - and as Network Rail admit, that doesn't always happen.
"They do [depend on scrupulous metal dealers]. And there are some out there," Lowe said. "But there are also some that are not. We and BT and the Energy Networks Association, and the affected essential infrastructure providers if you will that are all being targeted with this problem meet quite regularly to discuss how we might encourage beefing up of the 1964 scrap metal dealers act because as one of our group calls it, it's Steptoe & Son legislation."
And as Lowe admits, ultimately this may be a problem that in the short term is at the mercy of the weather - and eventually the markets.
"We can track incidents against the price of copper. They do follow a graph together. We're hoping in some respects for a very bad winter as in four feet of snow they don't tend to nick it. But then that brings other challenges so it doesn't really help."