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BERLIN (Reuters) - A court in Germany has convicted three men of stealing over four km (2.5 miles) of rail track, weighing nearly 500 tonnes, to sell as scrap metal.
The court in the city of Marburg said Tuesday the men, aged 26 to 29, pretended to be working for the national rail operator Deutsche Bahn when they began carving up a disused line between nearby Niederwalgern and Lohra with blowtorches.
The three suspects, all Germans born in the former Soviet Union, had removed 476 tonnes of steel track by the time they were caught when a local man contacted Deutsche Bahn to check their story. (Talk about snoopy neighbours and neighbourhood pride)
The crime has become so famous that the regional education ministry has used it as a model for a math exam, asking pupils to calculate the weight, volume and value of the stolen steel.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Wow.
This seriously reminds me of the time i was a fresher in my Engineering college in India. We had Mechanical Workshop Practicals where we had to file metal pieces, polish and bring them to shape (proper rectangle, triangle blocks etc...)
Me and my friend hit upon this brilliant ploy and used to collect and bring all the scrap metal pieces back to out hostel rooms, and after we did that through the year, we thought we had a fortune to sell to the street hawker who exchanges scrap metal pieces for date fruit.
Now, we didnt want to short change or sell ourselves so cheap for a years hardwork of sneaking pieces and carrying them to our rooms and safeguarding them in our lockers and dreaming of the money i will fetch.
So, we put the metal pieces we hd collected between us over the year in my friends travel bag, and took a bus to downtown vellore (sounds grand, doesnt it?) in peak May Vellore summer to a hardware store that would weigh the pieces and pay MONEY straight up. After much bickering amongst us en route on what to do with all the money we'd get ( i wanted beer and he wanted rum), we took solace from the thought we'd have enough for both and some more. The hawker weighed our pieces and gave us 15 rupees. 15 rupees for a years work of diligently carrying the pieces from lab back to hostel room, sneaking it behind the professors back, saving it from other friends who had similar ideas and taking the trouble of a 30 minute 2 bus change (@ 3 rupees per head one way) from katpadi, where our college was.. to vellore.
Boy, we had a lemonade each and made the return trip in without (local slang for travelling ticketless). The rest of our friends were eagerly anticipating us returning with hard cash that just not to let them down, or be the laughing stock later on in our college life, if they got the real dope on what happened, we had to shell whatever we had out of pocket and share a half beer and act drunk so the odor would carry through and the others would be convinced we had got some money but drunk it ourselves..
It was a very miserable day but we learnt our lessons: that petty crime doesnt pay. It served a purpose too. We were pretty put off by our initial fiasco we didnt have the heart to pinch resistors, capacitors, transistors etc.. from subsequent years labs. Turns out a good thing. They come at 10 rupees for 4 transistors, and you get the rest for fucking free.
