Bicycles have been a hot commodity during the Year of Covid because it’s a way for people to get out and get some exercise. I would lean more towards steal-and-sell than scrapping them just because the profits from selling bikes would be so much higher.
Thieves organized enough to steal 200 at once are also organized enough that they might have transported them hundreds of miles before selling them.
Or they offer them on Ebay.
Good one! : 
Turns out NBC only had part of the story. These were $100 battery-powered plastic things, not steel.
Probably not relevant to this story, given the new information, but there are definitely unscrupulous scrappers out there, or scrap-metal theft wouldn’t be such a problem to begin with. I mean, maybe someone who brings in a bunch of old wire and pipe could have plausible deniability to claim that they were just renovating their home… but when manhole covers are getting stolen, there just has to be some scrapper who’s in on it, because there’s no legitimate reason for anyone to be scrapping manhole covers.
On the other hand, I really don’t understand the economics of the scrap industry. There’s a place near my mom’s house where there are some old abandoned railroad tracks, that have just been left in the ground for the grass to grow up around them. Even if the railroad, or the city, or one of the plants nearby officially owns them, nobody would miss them if they disappeared. And they’re literally right across the road from three scrapyards. And yet, there they remain.
That’s two trikes against you.
Maybe people that are in the stealing for scrap business don’t have the tools to rip train tracks out of the road, and get them into manageable pieces that could be loaded into the back of a pick up. An angle grinder would probably take an hour and a lot of discs to get through it and a cutting torch is expensive and bulky and the metal is hot when you’re done and you’d almost have to do it in broad daylight to avoid drawing attention to yourself from the flame and sparks.
It’s probably safer than trying to rip the copper out of live circuits, but I’m guessing a lot of people are more concerned about getting $10 to last them a day than $100 to last them a week.
Here’s a little more information about selling scrap from the railroad industry.
Decommissioning railroads is a really big deal, and I’ve read more than one story from a current or former school bus driver who still had to stop at a railroad crossing that had been dormant for so long, trees were growing between the tracks. However, it hadn’t been fully inactivated, so traffic laws required that they still do this.
Don’t be ridiculous. These are the most likely culprits:
Makes me think of that bicycle that plays American music when you ride it, the Gerschwinn.
Hey, now - enough of that! Don’t make me pull this internet over.
As has been mentioned, Railroad property is not easy to scrap. Even “unscrupulous” scrap dealers do not want to end up in a federal penitentiary.
Stealing from any RR is a federal crime & both the RRs & the Feds take it very seriously.
I once had a contract to sell used RR ties. The paperwork was insane as were the many & often inspections from both the RR involved & the Feds that were involved, (more than one agency). For that & other reasons it made little sense to me to renew my contract. There were/are easier ways to earn a living.
147 I can see. 200? Just obsessive.
In the meantime, they’ve replaced 20 of them.
But what happened to the originals?