Thieves steal 40-tonne locomotives

Thieves steal 40-tonne locomotives


04.08.05


Russian thieves have made off with two 40-tonne locomotives from a museum in the icy north of the country.

The locomotives were used to pull the trains that ferried materials to construct Josef Stalin's prison camps in the Siberian Gulag. For 50 years they had been preserved at the Permafrost museum in the town of Igarka and had been on display since Stalin died in 1953 and Gulag-building came to an end.

Okay...

How exactly does one take off with two 40 ton locomotives? If they're steamers, the smoke from the smokestacks, not to mention fires from the fireboxes would have been easily detectable, as would the sound of running water to fill the tenters and the assorted hissing and whatnot that they make from making steam.

Diesels... loud starters and audible noise running, yet nobody heard anything?

It's not like you can just put them in your pockets and walk off with them, dissassembling them would take time and tools, not to mention the comotion of cranes and trucks to haul them away by land, or the sound of helicopters if you tried to airlift them out of the area they were sitting in.


Maybe they were just "beamed" to another location? (For those who have never seen the TV series "Star Trek," "beaming" or "transporting" was a method of transport used in the show and movies, in which ones atoms were disassembled by a machine, transmitted to another location and reassemled by a similar machine in the desired destination. One could also be transported without a second machine, if they, or the desired object, were close enough to the first machine. I'm sure it's still confusing, but it's as simple an explanation as I could make!)

sadly i would say these locos ended up as scrap . possibly they cut them up on site and took them away bit by bit , but more likely there was somebody turning a blind eye for a backhander .
i dont know what scrap metal is worth a tonne in Russia , maybe something like $ 30 a tonne , so its sad to think these locos were cut up for the sake of $ 1200 . more likely they would have made less than that .

Ya, its sad that those locos probably ended up as part of someone's illegal machine gun or something. But wouldn't someone hear the thiefs cutting up the locomotives?

Without more information its hard to tell . Probably somebody involved with the musuem was involved with covering it up .

Whilst doing a google search to try and find out the cost of scrap in Russia , i found a number of companies after scrap rail . presumably for use on sdings etc .
Which makes me wonder if railway lines in remote areas will start disappearing ?
Certainly it is a problem with rural phone lines and power lines , ( probably one reason why fibre optics and sattelites have become a popular way to provide rural phone service ) ,but there you are dealing with copper and aliminuim , which has a lot higher scrap value .
here in New Zealand , railway sleepers(ties) are popular with landscapers , and its not uncommon for them to be stolen from beside railway lines , where replacement is underway .

AznSumtinSumtin wrote:Ya, its sad that those locos probably ended up as part of someone's illegal machine gun or something. But wouldn't someone hear the thiefs cutting up the locomotives?

I'm almost certain they ended up in China. Most Russian scrap metal ends up there. BTW, these were steam locos.

David Benton wrote: Which makes me wonder if railway lines in remote areas will start disappearing ?

This was a case in 1994-1998, when whole industrial sidings (not even abandoned) were dismantled by thieves and sold as scrap. They also used to pull the aluminium wire of 10kv electrical lines down and steal phone cable. Now the biggest problem seems to be manhole covers - some cities even weld them with manhole itself so nobody can remove it.

Chinas demand is certainly driving up prices for scrap worldwide .
along with most other industrial commodities .