Modern-day train heists are seeing a dramatic rise
Modern-day train heists are seeing a dramatic rise
In 2024, there were more than 65,000 train thefts in the U.S., which is a 40% increase from the year before.
It’s perhaps a surprising number when, in the American imagination, train heists seem to belong in previous centuries. However, not only do they clearly still happen, all that cargo theft accounts for somewhere between $15 and $35 billion in annual losses.
So what is going on?
Malia Wollan is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. She joined “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal to talk about where this resurgence in theft is coming from, and who ends up responsible for the losses. An edited transcript of their conversation is below.
Kai Ryssdal: You think “train heist,” and you think guys in masks and six shooters and horses and all of that. That is not this.
Malia Wollan: That is not this. Modern-day train thieves are a whole different thing. There’s no guns. There are bolt cutters and mechanized saws and deserts.
Ryssdal: How does it work?
Wollan: Yeah, so there are a couple different ways it works. The sort of most extreme version is thieves actually go out into more remote parts of California and Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, and they cut the air compression brake hoses that run between train cars, which forces an emergency stop. And then they cut the locks off the containers, they unload what they want, and trucks come pick it up and they drive away. But oftentimes a conductor or an engineer doesn’t even know a heist is happening. I mean, some of these occur when a train is stopped to let another train pass, and basically it’s happening three miles back. They have no idea until, you know, maybe another train passes and calls the train police dispatcher and says there’s theft underway.
Ryssdal: You know, we’ve all seen freight trains, and they look, to the layperson’s eye, you know, basically indistinguishable. But you talk about this guy in this piece who spent time figuring out what the symbology means and how to decode what’s inside and figuring out, like, what cars he ought to hit and to maximize his take.
Wollan: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, people can do a lot of research online, and there’s also a lot of cases where there is insider information, either from warehouses or from the port or from train yards. I heard stories of very specifically targeted crews, like there are crews who only go for tires. Apparently, there’s a good resale market. There are crews that only hit train cars that carry new cars, and they go inside and they take all the catalytic converters out of new cars, and then they leave.
Ryssdal: They’re specialized labor, right? I mean, that’s what they’re doing. Cargo is insured, as you point out, and security is not something that these companies are interested in investing in.
Wollan: Yeah, you know, it’s complicated. I think shipping is very cheap, and people all on the supply chain are reticent to make it expensive. And just the sheer volume of stuff going on the rails, you know, at a certain level, people are, I think, willing to take some level of risk. But, that said, there are a lot of different types of law enforcement working on this issue, including, you know, companies like Nike have their own loss prevention and asset recovery teams that go out and do detective work to try and get the stuff back.
Ryssdal: The catch, of course, is that you’ve got the railroads, you’ve got the companies who own or are shipping the cargo, you’ve got police bureaucracies involved. So it’s a little bit tragedy of the commons, right? It’s this thing that’s happening that there’s no one person who’s, like, responsible.
Wollan: Yeah, that’s true to some degree. A fair amount of this work falls to local law enforcement. It’s like rural Sheriff departments, so, you know, they don’t necessarily have the resources to put a lot into this. And also, the train companies, the rail industry, has changed a lot in the last decade or so. They’ve cut 30% of employees and they’ve made longer and longer trains, so there are also fewer people looking after longer and longer trains.
Ryssdal: And then, you know, not to bring it all home to the consumer, but we’re the ones paying the high prices because, or higher prices because all these, you know, Nikes, for instance, are getting stolen.
Wollan: Yeah, that’s right. And in the case of rail, you know, shippers don’t have a ton of options. It’s essentially a duopoly. On the West Coast, there’s just BNSF and Union Pacific. So it’s not as though, you know, you hear one rail company’s having issues with theft, you have a bunch of options of where you can go. There’s just two companies.
Ryssdal: And we should point out here, shipping by rail is so much cheaper than shipping by truck, right?
Wollan: It’s cheaper and it’s also fewer emissions, so there are definitely reasons to want to ship by rail, but, to be clear, this is definitely happening in the trucking industry as well. So cargo theft, writ large, has increased quite dramatically.
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