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Caboose museum to liquidate equipment following vandalism
That requires a lot of loud machinery to cut up the cabooses. A scrap dealer must have cut them up with his own crew.
Pass a law that says scrappers are responsible for monetary damages caused by the stolen materials found in their facilities.
Those weren’t vandals, those were illegal scrappers. It’s high time that law enforcement cracked down on scrapyards accepting “suspect” scrap. We had a power outage because some guys stole copper from live transmission wires!
Everybody knows there is no railroad security when it comes to playing and vandalizing. A graffiti covered industry conveys this.
It is a shame plans for a caboose museum were laid to waste.
Where did the vandalism occur?
It sounds like an all too common story of lots of initial enthusiasm and minimal resources. Nearly 20 years after the organization was founded it seems the museum was still being “planned” and yet to be “developed”. I can only go by the information provided here. There is no indication whether they actually owned or leased a site.
Perhaps the cabooses were being stored at several sites and those four were in one rarely visited by the group. It does suggest to me that they were not particularly active in maintaining the entire collection.
Dispersing the collection is an acknowledgement that their dream was proving to be unrealistic. Preservation is an expensive hobby - the initial acquisition by sale or donation opens up another money hole with each additional piece of equipment.
Are any of them unique and significant examples? I don’t know. Often this type of group grabs anything that comes available, rather than first developing a coherent collection policy to guide and focus their efforts on the most historically important. We can’t save everything; trying to do so ultimately leads to this type of failure where everything is in danger of being scrapped.
How do you cut up 4 cabooses and nobody notices?
As pres of ARCHES we have had success with placing 14 cabeese
at other museums, city parks and tourist lines. Our pride is S00
#29 on loan to the Ky Ry Museum. We also maintain FRISCO #398 in Valley Park, MO the site of our annual meeting on Sat.
Nov. 1.
We had a suspect in the “torching” and when we went to sue, he declared bankruptcy. We also went to the Fed. Dist. Attorney but since the value was “only” ($64K) they couldn’t be
bothered,
Take a look at our website and see some of the things we do,
along with publishing " Captive Cabeese in America" which
lists 7,500 cabeese. Dues in our organization (never had an
increase since 1995) are only $15+. Join now and it will be
good for all of 2015. As we say: “Don’t let the END, END! Now
is when the END justifies the MEANS to preserve it.”
COME AND GET ON BOARD!
In Utah we have had cases where the ifs have pulled up to interstate lighting boxes in the middle of the night, opened the boxes, hooked it on to their trucks and took off down the road jerking the copper wire out of the lighting conduits and turning interchanges dark and costing the state of Utah tens of thousands of dollars each time this happen. The state has had to resort to all kinds of crazy means to prevent this that simply make it more difficult to operate and maintain lighting on the interstates. And the scrap metal dealers simply tell us it’s not their job to police this problem. So what do you do?
Any responsible scrap dealer will take descriptions of scrap sellers. The ones that won’t comply should be simply shut down and the dealer purchases scrap knowing the scrap is hot should be subject to criminal prosecution.
In Chicago a Scrap Dealer stole and scrapped 4 school buses.
It is the same method of operation by a Scrap dealer in the St. Louis area. This time it was 4 cabooses cut up by a scrap dealer. The victims and the police are need to check on all the scrap yards immediately, to see if anything is left over.
It does seem like scrap yards need to be required to keep a manifest & run license numbers. I don’t know if they’re necessarily complicit, but it seems they might be playing plausible deniability in the cases of accepting suspicious loads.
Brooklyn Navy Yard PCC cars
As stated above, this isn’t vandalism, it’s theft. This isn’t to say that museum and display vandalism doesn’t occur. It does, and is also a serious problem. But they are distinct and should be distinguished as such in these news items.
We in the USA are way too civilized when it comes to punishing vandals, scrappers &,THEIVES. Back in '95 I was in the Mid East and saw several one handed people. When asked about this I was told they were caught taking what was not theirs. WOW, I thought. Pretty harsh. But I started looking for anyone with 2 hands removed and guess what , none. I figure the one handed guys just got too good to get caught a second time OR they learned their lesson. Might work here W/O lawyers.
What to do? It’s simple, really. Have any scrap yard that accepts scrap that is bought for $50 or more record the seller’s name and address, obtained from a driver’s license.
If it’s working for pawn shops, it’ll work for scrap yards.
The suspect declared bankruptcy! Make the parents pay! I’m sick and tired of parent(s) not being made responsible for raising poorly parented, uneducated and semi-feral punks.