44 AMP said:
The report doesn't mention if, or how the gangs are targeting certain cars, and didn't mention how many boxcars get broken into. Only ones that had guns in them were mentioned...
PERHAPS they are relying on inside information, but who has information about what is in each car of a train, and where it is going to be at any given time? Only certain people in the railroad know that kind of thing, and I would think that non-hazardous material, bulk "dry goods" is not a high priority tracking item.
Although I don't work in the railroad industry, I've hung around with people who do, so I know just a little about how the system works.
The railroads DO actually keep close tabs on where cars are located and a broad description of what's in them, and this information is available to many employees, but my understanding is that the key word is "broad." IOW the contents of a cargo container are more likely to be listed as "dry goods" rather than "422 televisions, 130 rifles, and 2,000 boxes of shower curtains."
However, sophisticated thieves with inside information can often make a reasonable guess of what a car contains based on where it's going and coming from. A key thing to understand is that railroads got out of the less-than-carload (LCL) freight business decades ago; what's why your local freight station is occupied by a restaurant and loft apartments rather than a railroad shipping department.
Railroads move entire cars (or most often blocks of them) from one point to another; they don't move smaller loads piecemeal. Hence, if you know where most Walmart shipments containing Item X come from, you can target cars coming from that place, but it's likely a giant distribution center that also handles many other items.
I speculate that the thieves may have had inside information regarding the car's origin and destination, rather than what exactly is in it – hence the reported hit-and-miss nature of their haul. Think of how little space 100-odd rifles would occupy in a shipping container full of sporting goods. It could be that the guns were incidental to their intended target, which may have been something more easily fenced, like electronics or expensive athletic shoes.
Another important point is that I could understand railroads being hesitant to issue any sort of bulletin regarding exactly which cars contain a particular type of valuable goods, precisely BECAUSE the information could wind up in the wrong hands! Police departments are by no means immune to corruption.
Aguila Blanca said:
I wonder if a boxcar full of AR-15s would be locked, while a boxcar full of newsprint rolls or Cheerios wouldn't be locked.
I suspect that there is no difference, as the railroads wouldn't want to give the thieves any clues.
Also, I seriously doubt that anyone ever ships an entire carload of AR-15s. Since deregulation, railroads have also largely gotten out of the small-scale single-car shipment business; they prefer to deal with blocks of cars or even entire trains for customers who are moving lots of cargo on a regular basis. I seriously doubt that any gunmaker sells enough guns to a single customer on a regular-enough basis to warrant shipping by rail. The AR-15s probably move from the manufacturer to a distribution center by truck, from which point they're loaded into individual cars bound for different stores. Most of these shipments likely involve high-volume customers such as Walmart or Academy Sports. That said, one could imagine a scenario where thieves target cars coming from the Walmart distribution center nearest to a major gunmaker location such as Springfield, MA or Prescott, AZ.
Koda94 said:
I bey a boxvar[sic] full of smartphones and other electronics gets as much theft a guns.
Probably more, considering that electronics dealers are subject to less federal scrutiny. In fact, most of the stories I've heard about sophisticated train burglary* rings concerned electronics. IIRC another commonly stolen item is auto parts, as there's a large market for them, and they're generally very hard to trace. FWIW I've read that much of the thieves' haul of these items winds up overseas.
*Footnote: IMHO these thefts are best characterized as burglaries rather than robberies in the classic sense. As I understand it, almost all of them are perpetrated by thieves pulling a truck up to a parked train car on an isolated siding and unloading it.
