Do people still rob trains? (including shipping containers)

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?

Do you realize how lucky those of us are who have wives who can talk about things like that with imaginative and well-thought-out opinions?

I think your wife is right on all points. The trains do travel faster than they seem. In addition intermodal cars are not really made to be traversed on foot, so going to back to front would be quite the ordeal, and the locks on these things are strong enough that simple bolt cutters wouldn’t be enough.

Also, I’m pretty sure that if the container is on a well car, at least for the bottom container, the doors won’t open even if the container is completely unlocked just because part of the car is in the way.

I vote with your wife.

A recurring theme on these boards is how stupid most criminals are. My guess is that they’re pretty lazy, too. The logistics of what you’re suggesting - while the train is in motion - is surreal.

My WAG is that boltcutters aren’t enough. Take a look at this train - I don’t know if there’s even enough space between the containers to get the doors open.

Many of the items being shipped by rail are bulky items that are shipped this way because the margin is low and the items do not have vital delivery dates. High value items ship by truck.

You might open the container doors to find; unlabeled cans of tuna/salmon on their way from the cannery to the labeler/packager, toilet paper, chicken feed, one ton bulk bags of soybeans, next week’s Home Depot sale on charcoal briquettes, you get the idea.

Somewhere in all these containers you might find a LTL container (less than load) which is a combination of various items that might be worth something. But even then, is the high value item up front? In the back? What is all this shit? Where is the good stuff? Since you are probably robbing this train in the dark you are going to loose your motivation quickly.

Trying to get all this done on a moving train quickly becomes silly once you realize that when the train stops at it’s destination it is not inside a secured area, the whole fucking train is still sitting out in the open.

You are going to need information on the items being shipped, from an inside contact in the shipping department.

If you get that, why don’t you just steal the stuff before they put it on the train?

And don’t throw your wife off the train, she’s smart.

That was one of the questions, which was, what gets shipped by train versus truck? I figured the stuff might go by train to a central processing location and then get distributed to the individual stores by truck, hence the concept for the theft.

For example, I would expect all the iPads for all the Walmarts in California might go by train from the dock to some middle-of-nowhere storage facility where the land was cheap and then be shipped out by trucks from that location, along with other supplies for a given store based on forecast sales. At some point, however, I would expect one or more containers entirely full of iPads was coming off a boat from China en-route by train to that storage facility.

Perhaps this idea is a bit too advanced and dangerous for the thief, and perhaps you need a welding torch to break into a container. I really don’t know. My thinking of the perfect crime was: two guys show up in a pick-up in Palm Springs and find a spot with a curve in the track where the train has to slow down enough to be easy to get on. Guy #1 jumps on the train with his bolt cutters, and guy #2 goes down the 10 freeway headed East in his pick up with the two guys staying in contact with each other via cheap walkie talkies. Guy #1 then spends the next several hours opening containers and uses a flashlight and box cutters to see what is in the outer most layer of boxes of each container, then moves on to the next car if it’s underwear or corn or something else unsellable. If he gets a hit, then he waits for some obvious landmark (like a dirt road that crosses the track and radioes his buddy to pick it up. He can use his cell phone to get a good GPS location of where he is. Worst case scenario, they don’t find anything and they waste a tank of gas with guy #2 picking up guy #1 somewhere in Gila Bend, AZ at another curve in the track where the train slows down enough for him to safely jump off. The train moves signifcantly slower than the traffic on the freeway, so it’s not like the truck can’t keep up with the train even if the guy is throwing off multiple boxes, and most packaged goods are pretty solid in their packaging design, so in my mind, if guy #1 throws a box of iPads into the sandy area to the side of the tracks from the moving train, it should still be fine.

In terms of national publicity, probably the best example would be the “Conrail Boyz” from Jersey.

http://lubbockonline.com/stories/090503/nat_0905030060.shtml

They were featured on an episode of “Masterminds” a few years back.

The ringleader really seemed to buck the “stupid criminal” trend, as he didn’t just randomly jump aboard slow-moving trains and grab whatever was available. He actually went out and bought a railroad radio from an old locomotive, and used it to speak to dispatchers, rail crews, and others, posing as a railroader himself. This allowed him to find out where certain trains were, when they were expected, what they’d be carrying, etc. The gang made millions.

Closer to home (literally):

The Union Pacific Little Rock Subdivision goes behind my house. Lots of traffic, even as a directional line. In '99, my friends and I found the remnants of a train robbery on my property near the tracks. There was a trail leading from the tracks (in the woods) to the main U.S. highway that runs parallel about 200 yards away, through a highline right-of-way. These guys must have worked at night, because they used chunks of styrofoam every 10 feet or so to mark the trail.

The first thing we came upon were hundreds of Nike shoeboxes, all empty, in a pile in the woods. There were unused black trash bags there, too, so we figured the guys dumped the kicks into the backs and hoofed them to the highway.

When we followed the trail, we found a circle of about 50 feet that was covered in Panasonic TV boxes, flattened. That’s where they got their styrofoam. The TV boxes were closer to the road–about 20 yards from the shoulder and down an incline. Because of the tall grass in the right-of-way, you couldn’t see it until you were right on top of it.

In the above case, I’m relatively sure the train crew was in on it, because trains don’t stop on the single track behind the house. There’s a permissive signal there, but even if it’s red, trains would stop and proceed without talking to the dispatcher, and there are no sidings until the next town. Plus, they’d have to have spotted the car in that certain place, and told the thieves what the loot would be.

Accessing the containers from cargo ships is no problem whatsoever, though unless you know ahead of time you’re as likely to find cheap Asian-made toys as you are to find flatscreen TV’s. But EVERYTHING that’s made in Asia and imported by ship travels by rail.

I’m an engineer for a major railroad in the Northeast, and the answer is yes, people still rob trains. We get a police escort for many of our trains into and out of the NYC metro area. Mainly the UPS and container trains. Nobody is going to rob some thing like a coal train.

This is a misconception. What do you think is in those containers and trailers with the big refrigeration units on them? Railroads ship plenty of high value goods, like seafood, fresh produce, cars, consumer electronics beer and wine and ect. In fact, if you see an item on your local store shelf, there is a very good chance it moved by rail at some point.

The key point is the thieves will normally hit the train in terminal areas, when the train is moving slowly or stopped.

The old “toss it from the moving train” model also presumes that you can unload enough to make it worthwhile and still have time to collect it all along a few miles of track without being seen and reported. Might work if you hit iPad paydirt, but for something moderately good, like sneakers, you need to do a lot more work - the parked train seems a lot more profitable.

Many railway thefts involve collusion with train/railway staff - carriages get identified and decoupled on to remote sidings to be raided. Some are crimes of opportunity. Where I grew up, there was a rail spur to the local paper mill. Consumables came in, and newsprint, timber and logs went out. Occasionally a container would accidentally get directed to the mill. It would be diverted to a siding, investigated and raided if it contained goods of value. I recall rumours of TVs and household lots of effects going missing. But how often it really happened, I don’t quite know.

It all comes down to intel it seems. With a tip-off, inside man, or a hack - your odds go up.

An inside man is not really needed, the thieves already know which trains to rob. Any train hauling containers or truck trailers is going to have high value merchandise. They know which boxcars will likely be carrying the beer and wine because they see them being unloaded at the final destination.

I’ll explain how they rob the trains.

First, they gather at a place just out side of a major terminal, where they know the train will only be going about 10 MPH max. It’s pretty much impossible to rob inside the terminal because the security is actually quite good. Electrified razor wire, railroad police, main gate guards, ect.

Then, they will force the train to go into emergency braking by severing the brake line between the cars. I’m simplifying here, but train brakes work by reducing air pressure in the brake line. If a train is stopped with the slack between the cars bunched up, they will some times just pull the cut lever and separate the cars. That too will put the train in emergency when we try to move again. There are many other tactics the use to stop the train, and I have some stories.

Once the train is stopped, they start robbing it. Many of our trains are 10,000+ feet long, so they just stop the train near the rear. By the time the conductor walks back there, they are already long gone. Some locations were so bad, that the conductor wouldn’t even start walking until the cops were there to walk with him.

This kind of thing is mostly in the past. It was a huge problem in New Jersey and Worcester, MA 25 to 30 years ago. Now a day’s security is very high in the likely hot spots, as I said our high-value commodity trains get a police escort for the first 10 miles into and out of our part of NJ. It’s almost completely stamped out in Worcester.

People do still try it from time to time.

I thought the train robbery in Breaking Bad was pretty good. The main goal of the thieves is to stop the train. BB used a car on a grade crossing, probably a better idea then putting the train into emergency. This way there was no need for the conductor to walk the train.

Real world thieves are not looking for a specific car, that would take inside information. I got a kick out of the whole scene, it was clear a little bit of research was done.

The BB robbery method required the level crossing to be in exactly the right location so that the right train carriage would stop over the trestle bridge and for it to by coincidence be in a mobile phone dead zone AND for there to be no corners before the level crossing for far enough distance that the train could actually stop in time before hitting the stopped truck.

Somehow I can’t see it being too practical in RL.

Yes, but they had the ultimate insider who handed them the train, the time, the deadzone, and the tanker.

There are robberies of train cargos, but I don’t remember hearing of it happening while the train is in motion. Way simpler to rob the merchandise when the train has not yet moved or not yet been unloaded.

(emphasis mine)

I’m confused. Do people actually rob the trains or do they just do a B and E? (Breaking and entering).

I’ve got a guy who can get you like 60 bucks a ton for some good Central App coal. Who wouldn’t want to steal that?

Thank you! I’ve been itching to post that we’re discussing people burglarizing trains, not robbing trains. :dubious:

Robbery is taking property by force or threat of force, so robbing a train would be the Western-movie scene of holding up the passengers for their valuables or the crew in the mail/express car for valuable mail/packages/gold shipments, etc. Or the real-life Great Train Robbery.

Like the train burglaries we’ve been discussing, a train robbery can also have an inside man. :stuck_out_tongue: