We’re committed to cleaning litter and preventing fly-tipping on the railway. It’s a serious problem that not only looks bad, but also affects your safety on the railway.
Litter can attract rats which can chew on signal cables, leading to signal failures, delays and even accidents.
Fly-tipping is also dangerous – especially if you go onto the railway tracks. It’s a criminal offence too, and carries a fine of up to £1,000.
How we tackle litter
We have a statutory duty to clean up any litter on our land and we’ll always act quickly to remove litter which could affect your safety.
If for example a shopping trolley was left on the tracks, we’d make this a priority and remove it immediately.
Smaller amounts of litter which don’t affect safety on the other hand are cleaned up during regular, scheduled cleaning operations.
These take place on all our lines, with the busiest lines such as popular commuter routes being cleaned more often than quieter ones.
Preventing litter and fly-tipping
While we can’t guarantee a completely clean railway, we try to prevent litter and fly-tipping as much as we can by:
- Working with the British Transport Police to investigate and, where appropriate, prosecute people who commit litter and fly-tipping offences
- Maintaining good security to stop people illegally accessing railway sites
- Using CCTV to monitor sites where people commit fly-tipping
- Using nobblers which puncture tyres both inside and outside access gates for railway land
- Enforcing legal agreements so that our tenants (eg shops at the stations that we manage) do not cause any litter problems
- Encouraging contractors to remove all litter, debris and other materials from our sites when they’ve finished a job
Need more information?
If you want to know more about how we deal with litter and fly-tipping, or want to report an incident, please get in touch with us.