Some 20 years ago (good grief
) I worked for one of the telecom companies that was laying the then new fibre optic telecom trunk cables along the lineside.
There was a regular problem of our cable being dragged out of the cable troughs to be laid across the running line for the next train to cut it into handy pieces for carrying off. Problem is that fibre optic cable is all glass and is worthless, so they would just leave it and walk off in disgust. However once it was damaged someone then had to splice 1000 tiny hairlike glass strands back together. A really tedious job.
There was also a regular problem of the cable being cut "somewhere in the north of England" at 4.30pm precisely every Friday. Of course that would mean that a whole lot of Lookouts and Flagmen and PICOWS etc would be needed for a extra spot of Saturday Overtime, while the poor old telcom engineer glued the cable back together.
I seem to recall that the cable was strangely never cut when ******* United were playing at home.
They did find the ringleader eventually.