"One involves sacking cargo trains rolling through the American southwest.
In the past few months, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona has prosecuted at least 15 individuals for allegedly being part of schemes in which trains are brought to a sudden, dangerous stop and looted, and stolen merchandise is hauled away to California or Nevada."
I'll guess that most of these are "double-stack" trains, which have two shipping containers (with one sitting on top of the other).
These have end doors, not "side doors" like boxcars.
The theives will try to disrupt the "brake pipe" that runs the entire length of the train (normally charged around 90lbs psi) which controls the brakes. Between the cars, there's a rubber brake hose with a connector, mates with the same from the other car.
If these can be knocked apart, the air is instantly vented from the brake pipe and the train goes into emergency (that's how the brakes are supposed to work).
Now they swarm the cars (they somehow know which ones hold "the good stuff") break open the doors (I'll GUESS that even with pretty good locks on the latches the theives have equipment to get in anyway), perhaps have some trucks waiting not far away.
Do this at a remote location (plenty of those along the railroad lines out west), and by the time the police can get there with enough strength to do anything, they're gone.
There's only one way to really fix this, and that will be to design the "well cars" that carry the containers so that it's physically impossible to OPEN a container door once it's secured in place. Even without any lock on the doors at all. There needs to be some kind of "barrier device" which swings into place once the container has been seated.
Now, once the container is loaded, it becomes "break-in proof". The only way to get INTO one will be to physically remove it from the well car in which it's sitting. Even the cartels aren't doing THAT out in the desert.
This will take some equipment re-design, but I don't see why it can't be done.
Until then, the railroads had better get used to paying all the damage claims...
