My wife and I regularly drive out to the Palm Springs, CA area, and see extremely long trains with container ship containers going town the tracks, presumably carrying cargo from the port of Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Diego, and others with all kinds of valuable merchandise.
To this I asked, why doesn’t someone rob these trains, and what protections do these trains have to even know they are being robbed? Considering how slow these trains are going, and the fact they parallel the freeway, I would think one or more thieves could climb on board and work their way from the back to the front of the train with a pair of bolt cutters, opening up containers and seeing what was inside. This could be taking place over several hours at night with an accomplice driving down the freeway and staying in communication with the thieves. If they found something valuable, like boxes of iPads, jewelry, etc., they could just toss it off the train and tell the accomplice where the box landed using GPS coordinates and have them pick it up, then jump off the train and get picked up down the road. I would think they could commit this crime over several hours without being caught. My wife insists this crime isn’t feasible because the train goes faster than I think, the containers have some kind of sensors that tell the train operators when they are opened, and that the thieves would have to go through hundreds of containers that contain bulk supplies of fruit, vegetables, etc, before they would ever find iPads unless they got lucky, and that throwing this stuff off the train would likely break it and render it unusable. She also thinks the truck that went to pick it up would leave enough evidence and be spotted by various surveillance cameras such that the thieves would never get far, and that robbing a liquor store had a far greater risk/reward than going after unknown cargo on a random train.
Who’s right? And has this ever been done?