Rail Infrastructure theft.
I work for the South African railways. We have some clients we serve from a municipal siding. To improve their service we want to build a new link line connecting the municipal siding to another mainline, which would avoid the Metro lines. Metro trains have heavy peak times and they don't allow the goods trains to run during peak times. Avoiding them would give more rail capacity for the goods trains.
As we walked a part of the siding, that is currently not in use, which we wanted to use as part of the new link, we noted some serious infrastructure theft.
If you look at the photo at the top, you will note that all the wooden sleepers that was under the points were stolen. The wooden sleepers are used to make some quite nice furnisher.
On the photo below they use concrete sleepers, the rail is fastened to the sleepers with steel spring clips, all of which were stolen. These steel springs are just sold as scrap metal. The value of scrap steel is quite low, but to repair the damage will cost a lot.
On the next photo the rail joints are stolen. (You can also see the spring clips are gone too) The joints are also just sold for scrap.
The rails are now just lying loose on the sleepers, the next move will most probably be to cut up the rails and steel them as well.
It is really sad to see expensive infrastructure that is used to drive the economy, just being vandalized like this!!
I hope you liked the post as much as I liked writing it.
I hope you have a wonderful day!!