Eastern Railroad Discussion > untagging freight cars

Be on the lookout for someone untagging freight cars:

http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/16383208.htm

In case you're getting your hopes up, this article is not about removing vandalism from freight cars. It's about someone stealing the RFID tags from cars.

Are they going to attach them to other cars just to make someone else's life miserable or something?

Probably crackheads thinking they are valuable enough to buy a fix.

Gonut1

The tags sell in the $20 - $40 range, depending on the type. (There are some unusual ones that sell for even more). These tags can be repogrammed and installed on other equipment.

Bryan_ Wrote:
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> The tags sell in the $20 - $40 range, depending on
> the type. (There are some unusual ones that sell
> for even more). These tags can be repogrammed and
> installed on other equipment.

"Other equipment"? Like what? Unless there's a non-railroad use for these tags, I can't imagine there being much of a black market for them.

Then again, I've always wondered who buys the car stereos that crackheads/methheads steal on a regular basis. With so many stolen, shouldn't the market be glutted by now?

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> Bryan_ Wrote:
>> "Other equipment"? Like what? Unless there's a
> non-railroad use for these tags, I can't imagine
> there being much of a black market for them.

Some trucking companies use these to track equipment in/out of terminals. Some scrap yards have tag readers at the scale have there trailers/containers equipped or supply tags to regular customers - speeds up the process at the scale. I would imagine other bulk scale operations may do same, so there are non railroad uses.

But come on - the tags themselves are useless - you have to program them. We get a set of 2 PROGRAMED for less than $40 - so the actual value of a tag is probably only $4 or $5 to a person who has a computer and can re-program them. And a person that has this capability isn't going to be buying tags from some jack-leg off the street, so I agree, there can't be much of a black market. But dumb people steal the dumbest stuff.

scraphauler Wrote:
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> But dumb people steal the dumbest stuff.


Sums it up quite nicely...

I was hauling a pallet box full of truck parts in the back of a pick-up one time. I hit a bump and some cardboard tubes fell out onto the road. The car behind me was filled with some tough looking "yutes" and they stopped, jumped out and grabbed them and took off without even looking to see what they were. They were valve cover gaskets for a Mack truck and consist of nothing more than a two foot long strip of silicone rubber. I'll bet they were disappointed when they opened them up! Stupid is as stupid does....

Some years back (probably 15 or 20), the local highway commission was having problems
with those little flashing yellow lights you see on baracades disappearing. They finally
found out what had happened to them. Some guy who wasn't quite altogether mentally, had
been "collecting" them. He had them all catagorized and everything.

The N&W General Office Buildings in Roanoke were adjacent to a bad part of town. I remember one time in the days before Personal Computers, someone broke a window and walked off with a CRT (computer monitor) which in those days was completely useless unless it ran off of a mainframe computer. I would have liked to see the thief try to figure out where the channel selector was.

Hello,
I have done and do the RFID tagging for TARGET and the tags (labels) cost anywhere from 40-70 cents a piece.....considering I load 2000 cartons......its a lot of cash. Plus with the electronics, you would be AMAZED at what those little chips/labels can do!!!!
You would be AMAZED!!!!
TheHammer
Mark