Friends of the Rail Forum

From the Google group uk.railways 18/05/07:

Men convicted of stealing railway line

A court in Germany has convicted three men of stealing over four km
of rail track, weighing nearly 500 tonnes, to sell as scrap metal.

The court in the city of Marburg said Tuesday the men, aged 26 to 29,
pretended to be working for the national rail operator Deutsche Bahn
when they began carving up a disused line between nearby Niederwalgern
and Lohra with blowtorches.

"They even went around handing out leaflets to locals asking for
understanding about the noise," a court spokesman said.

"The stolen tracks were worth about €170,000 altogether, but they'd
collected less than €100,000 by the time they were caught."

The crime has become so famous that the regional education ministry
has used it as a model for a maths exam, asking pupils to calculate
the weight, volume and value of the stolen steel.

The three suspects, all Germans born in the former Soviet Union, had
removed 476 tonnes of steel track by the time they were caught when a
local man contacted Deutsche Bahn to check their story. Two suspects
confessed and received 18-month suspended sentences. The third was
given two years and one month in jail.

I thpought this was going to end up as a story about someone from here!

Exactly why I posted it! At the risk of entering the field of politics, there's a perception amongst certain strata of South African society that all the problems of the new South Africa are unique and are caused by, er, the new South Africa. In fact similar problems are found all over the world and are usually the result of global political and socio-economic dynamics of which South Africa is no exception.

Recent railway examples include overhead cable theft from Italy and mismanagement of railways in Britain, particularly in the field of safety. UK railways are suffering the result of decades of under-investment which is only now being partially redressed. Our current beef with Spoornet over its concentration on freight at the expense of passengers is mirrored in the USA. The direct cause of the Ladbroke Grove crash in London a few years back was a driver who had only been driving for a few weeks who passed a red signal. People being taken off the streets with no railway background (unlike South Africa, they don't even have train assistants in most countries), given a few months training and then let loose on a train loaded with passengers or freight - well, that's what the industry is now like worldwide, not just South Africa. In both the UK and USA huge sums of money have had to be spent to make commuter railways "safe" for ordinary people to travel on - I believe many US subways now have a policeman riding on every train.

At a broader non-railway level, hgh crime rates are found within most societies where there is an underclass which feels it has little ownership of nor influence on society, and the decline of the inner cities is mirrored in the USA and elsewhere as the monied classes move to the suburbs. In the UK, out of town shopping malls are gradually replacing the old high street shops.

Or does this forum automatically censor politics?!