California

Trainlopnik

Thousands Of Stolen Packages And Empty Boxes Littering Railway Is Shocking, Totally Expected

Porch pirates are so 2021, now desperate people are going straight to the source

By Erin Marquis
Friday 9:29AM

Trains in downtown Los Angeles are traveling on rail lines covered with torn open packages and empty boxes after people raided cargo cars for the booty therein. For everyone playing Societal Collapse at home, we’re now at the wholesale train heist portion of our regression:

Link to tweet

The packages are largely from retailers like Amazon and REI. Packages that contained less valuable items, like still incredibly expensive Epi pens and hard-to-find rapid home COVID-19 tests, didn’t have a high enough resale value or usefulness and were left on the tracks with the rest of the debris.

This certainly isn’t a new problem, as Union Pacific admitted to cleaning the tracks at least every other month. Seems like it may need to step up the pace. Police say they don’t interfere with the rail yards unless requested, which is rare as rail companies operate their own security. The problem is so acute that CBS Local caught someone in the act while reporting from the yard:

{snip}

Stealing is not a good thing to do, we all know that. Thieves are out to make a quick buck at the expense of someone else. But this strikes me more as desperate, wholesale looting than property crime, and we should expect to see more of it as we ignore the mass suffering caused by rampant income inequality.