DAVID LEASK and WILLIAM TINNING They've been fighting for years. On one side of the tracks are the Westburn Young Toi Butchers; on the other, the Halfway Fleeto. The railway is their border, as unmoving as their endless, victorless wars.

DAVID LEASK and WILLIAM TINNING

They've been fighting for years. On one side of the tracks are the Westburn Young Toi Butchers; on the other, the Halfway Fleeto. The railway is their border, as unmoving as their endless, victorless wars.

The West Coast Main Line near Newton station in Cambuslang, outside Glasgow, last year topped Scotland's league table for track trespassing, mostly thanks to the area's teenage gang-fighters.

Twenty-four incidents were recorded in the first five months of 2007 alone. This year there were just four.

Scotland's railway chiefs said yesterday that they were starting to win their own little war against rail crime. Their weapon? After years of erecting heavy-duty fencing and bumping up patrols, Network Rail, the UK's track and infrastructure provider, has changed tack. It is investing in "diversionary" activities as well as traditional "hard" solutions: giving young people something else to do.

Jim (not his real name), a 16-year-old from Westburn, explained just how dicey some of the fights over the railway were getting. "We use anything we can get our hands on to fight the Halfway gang across the line," he said yesterday.

"We never really think about the trains, even though they pass pretty regularly. One day I was about to swing a pole at someone and it was knocked out of my hand by a passing train. It was scary. But we kept fighting."

The trouble started to ease last autumn. Volunteers set up a youth club. Six weeks ago Network Rail offered to help. A cyber-cafe has been promised; youngsters, excited at the prospect, are on their best behaviour.

Yesterday, Jim and 20 others from his Westburn youth club took part in No Messin', an activity day in Clackmannanshire which was partly sponsored by Network Rail. So did other young people from across Scotland, not least the host town of Alloa, whose first railway since the Beeching cuts of the 1960s opened this year.

The youngsters got the chance to see a professionally staged play which showed the potentially fatal consequences of playing on the tracks. They also got the run of a 25ft-high climbing wall, a bungee run and an assault course.

They were watched by Fergus Ewing, Scotland's Community Safety Minister. "The best way to help youngsters achieve their potential and divert them from antisocial behaviour and crime is to provide choices and chances in life - to try out sport, leisure and other activities," he said.

So what kind of success have the authorities been having in luring youngsters off the tracks? Network Rail has designated 10 hotspots - the places on its lines where most track crime was recorded, everything from theft and vandalism to potentially deadly trespassing. Its No 1 hotspot was Newton.

At the 10 hotspots, the number of recorded incidents from January to May 2007 was 97. In that period this year the figure was 53.

The hotspots are not the only places where the number of offences fell. In the last full financial year there were 2675 trespass and vandalism offences recorded on Scotland's railways, according to British Transport Police. That is down 16.2% from the year before. The number of stone or "missile" attacks on trains was down more than 23%.

This success comes despite the highest levels of train usage since the mass demobbings of 1946 and a huge increase in the number of CCTV cameras at stations and along tracks, which might have been expected to lead to more incidents being recorded.

In fact, 2007 was the first year since records began when no child was killed while playing on the railways in Britain.

People still lose their lives. Most are suicides. But there were 256 accidental public fatalities on UK railways over the past five years, 57 of in 2007. One in four involves someone aged between eight and 18. There were another 806 near-misses, half of them involving children.

It isn't just young gang members who run across railways. Newton has been replaced as the busiest hotspot: its place taken by Haymarket in Edinburgh, where there were 10 incidents in the first five months of this year, up from nine a year earlier.

Here, The Herald understands, the trespassers tend to be drunks cutting across the tracks from platform to platform rather than neds getting into fights.

Horrific freak accidents still happen. A 38-year-old woman died in March this year after clambering on to the tracks at Cardonald Station in Glasgow. She had stepped down to fetch something she had dropped.

Ron McAulay, Network Rail's director in Scotland, speaking at the No Messin' event in Alloa, said the deaths were more than enough reason for action.

He said: "When you add to that the cost of dealing with the graffiti, dealing with the damage to the railway and the infrastructure and the trains, which is running in excess of more than £250m a year, it is important that we tackle this issue.

"For a long time now we have been coming up with a number of initiatives for dealing with these things. We spend several million pounds a year trying to prevent trespassing and vandalism. This includes fencing and maybe cages around bridges to stop people throwing things on to the railway.

"We also try to tackle the problem through education, by going to schools with officers from the British Transport Police.

"We try to speak to kids at an early age so that they get the message that it is dangerous to do this, it is not right to do it, it is illegal, that they can face all sorts of penalties like prison sentences and fines, and that they put their own lives and the lives of others at risk.

"The third arm of the initiative is prosecution. It is a last resort. If people do go on to the railways, if they do vandalise, we will prosecute. The penalties range from a fine of £1000 up to prison sentences."

Back in Newton, mother-of-five Karen Crooks is delighted to see the fighting tail off. A volunteer youth leader, she set up Westburn Youth Project and is now working closely with Network Rail.

"The problem at Newton is gang fighting," she explained. "For decades there have been running battles almost every night involving kids from Halfway and Westburn.

"Very often, the fighting takes place on the Newton railway line, which is one of the busiest in Scotland and runs between the two communities.

"The kids regularly use the line as a battlefield. They often run across the line to confront each other. At times they even fight on the line, wielding sticks and throwing bottles and stones. "It is a miracle that no-one has been injured or killed by a train although two kids have died in gang fights."

Strathclyde Police has also been targeting gangs in and around Cambuslang and Rutherglen, with considerable success.

Ms Crooks and her youth project are pretty sure that the promise of a cyber-cafe has helped.

One project member, Steffanie Davis, 17, said: "There isn't enough to do for kids in our area. It is not a great surprise that there are regular fights.

"I hope everyone does stop fighting and stays away from the line. The youth club is helping. It is somewhere for us to go, somewhere we can talk about stuff, and talk to each other."