Beavers living in a swamp near Russia's famous Trans-Siberian Railroad gnawed through signaling cables, causing police and railway workers to rush to the scene, local transport police said in a statement Thursday.
The alarm was raised on a section of track in the Kemerovo region to the east of the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, the statement said.
“Often such situations arise when criminal metal hunters steal equipment or cut out cables from remote points on the line,” the statement read. “Police and railway workers rushed to the scene” where the evidence indicated a most unexpected culprit.
“The signaling had been ripped out by local beavers who live in a small nearby swamp. [The proximity of] a major railway line with heavy traffic had not apparently deterred the rodents,” police said in the statement.
No disruption was reported to train schedules as a result of the shenanigans of what the police referred to as “shaggy miscreants,” the statement said.
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