‘Marketplace’ had an interesting story about railroad theft. Thieves force stops on trains in the remote desert, have trucks ready to haul their booty. They steal tires(!) and catalytic converters off cars. Modern-day train heists are on the rise - Marketplace
I used to hop freight trains. A railroad cop caught me in Kansas City, Kansas. He told me they didn’t care much about people like me on freight cars; their biggest worry was people who got into automobiles - that’d have been a more pleasant ride.
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Not a heist…but train and car related.
In the 70’s when Japanese vehicles sales drastically increased and US manufacturers decreased there were a lot of very angry laid-off UAW workers - Although I’m not saying the following was done by a UAW worker. No one was ever caught.
There was a freight train traveling through central NY in the Syracuse area loaded with Toyota’s. Somewhere in that very rural and wooded area - someone (or many someone’s) put several hundred bullet holes in the brand-new vehicles. I don’t think even one vehicle made it through the gauntlet unscathed.
Today, we get angry people going after Teslas. My neighbor is so very glad that his was totaled recently in a car accident.
I just bought a trunk magnet to avoid vandalism.
“Bought when he was just quirky”
Any stronger than that and I’m concerned about a different crowd damaging my Model 3.
Vincent Chin.
I wondered about tire theft. I’d have thought there was more expensive stuff. While you can melt down a catalytic converter, a melted-down tire isn’t worth much. Who’s fencing a train-car load of tires?
Tire shops, the smallest shops I worked at kept about 800 tires in inventory and the bigger ones kept 1200-1500 + tires in inventory, Used tire shops also buy new tires for resale, I had multiple used tire shops that I would whole sell cheap tires for $1.00 over store cost and they would buy 50-200+ a month for their tire shops… I can imagine some of the independent tire shops would jump at the chance to buy stolen tires (not very tracible) at penny’s on the $ to resale at regular prices… A batch of tires from the same batch will have the same DOT numbers on them…
Is that worth the theft? Stopping a train in the desert, breaking into a car, hauling off the tires?
Won’t that make them easier to trace?
It’d be easy to put an ID in a tire.
I’m not a thief, so I can’t tell you what goes through peoples minds… lol
Not a detective either… lol
I really don’t remember how many of a batch of tires can be made a week (same DOT’s), but the police would have to go to every tire shop in the country checking to see if any of the shops had any instock without the proper paperwork on them…
We have set tires out on display during sales and whatever, and have had 10-20 tires stolen, made out police reports and even sometimes a description of the vehicle and never had any of the tires recovered…
It doesn’t matter what’s going through their minds, it matters what it pays. Guys doing this aren’t just throwing a brick through a window on a whim. They have a lot of money in the first place to pull the heist.