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The trains come to a stop from time to time. They break in to a container and throw as much as they can to the ground before the train continues. Once the trai
by codemac 5y ago
The trains come to a stop from time to time. They break in to a container and throw as much as they can to the ground before the train continues.
Once the train is moving again, they go through all the packages on the ground looking for things of value.
- Ansil849 5y agoSo the thieves just lurk around the area, waiting for trains to come to a pause, and then break open the containers, I guess the containers are not very secure? And there's minimal patrols? It just seems like extraordinary 'easy pickings'.
- Doxin 5y agoTurns out it's pretty tricky to make a padlock secure against bolt cutters. Of course improving the security of the lock would soon lead to thieves cutting off the locking bars on the container instead.
- Ansil849 5y agoIt doesn't have to be the lock that's secured. What about a hinge mechanism which takes a programmable amount of time to open the container door? If it takes 10 minutes for the door to open, the lock doesn't matter as much, since the thieves have a very limited amount of time before the trains start moving again, apparently.
- asdff 5y agoWay too complicated. Apparently shippers are opting to start just welding the door shut and unwelding it at the destination.
- dkdbejwi383 5y agoThat sounds like it could be quite error prone. If it's electronic, what about power failures? If mechanical, sounds like lots of intricate machined parts which will wear down over time.
- Ansil849 5y agoTime locks have been around for more than 100 years, I'm pretty confident that if something like this was desired by the powers that be, it would have been implemented. What I'm assuming is stopping it aren't the engineering challenges, but the fact that currently it's cheaper to let the thefts happen than it is to mitigate them.
- dkdbejwi383 5y agoI wonder what the cost of engineering secure containers would be vs. addressing the societal problems in the USA that lead to situations like this would be.
- unclekev 5y agoI guess you could apply some of the same solutions used in refrigerated shipping containers for power redundancy.
- ce4 5y agoThose are standardized containers standardized which are made in the millions as cheap as possible. That stuff needs to work, think of all the means of transport where it is used (vessels, trains, aircraft), be accessible for inspections (customs) and so on. The costs to secure and upgrade the containers for the whole system is probably a lot higher than accepting a small percentage of stolen parcel.
- kqr 5y agoContainers are secure in the sense that you can tell when you receive them whether someone has been inside them (and had the opportunity to change their contents). They are not secure in the sense that they prevent people from entering them.
- albert_e 5y agoso .. tamper-evident but not tamper-proof?
- fatnoah 5y agoCorrect. I think the main reason is that this "security" is geared more around Customs & Border enforcement than anything else.
- kqr 5y agoIt helps with customs, but it's a big deal for private businesses too. Before containers, you effectively had to have one trusted person's eyes on the cargo at all time -- and still people along the way lightened the load as they handled the stuff. It was almost considered part of the compensation for a longshoreman. With tamper-evident containers, you have a trusted person watch the container being loaded and locked, and then a trusted person watch as its unloaded at its final destination, and you don't have to care what happens at every point in between.
- fatnoah 5y agoMakes sense. 99% of what I know about container shipping comes from the movie Contraband and Season 2 of The Wire. ;)