Comment by mschuster91
14 days ago
> I wonder how common it is for train tracks to fracture?
That entirely depends on which class of tracks we're talking about. And on top of that, remember that Europe is at war with Russia, railway sabotage has been attributed to Russia already in Poland [1] - and if you ask me, I don't believe for a single goddamn second that "cable thieves" were the cause behind the infamous 2022 attack on Germany's railways [2] either.
> And what systems are in place to actually detect this.
In Germany, dedicated railway cars called "RAILab" [3] that can measure track performance at up to 200 km/h perform the bulk of the work. In addition, each piece of infrastructure has something called an "Anlagenverantwortlicher", a person responsible for it - and that person has to walk each piece of infrastructure every two years at the very least, sections that have shown to be problematic get walked sometimes weekly.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gknv8nxlzo
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2022_German_railway_at...
Copper theft has been a recurring problem in multiple European countries for well over a decade. Railway outages caused by damaged cabling increased as the copper price rose, and decreased as police cracked down on scrap dealers accepting railway cabling without proper provenance. Damaged aluminum and fiber cables are also common, as thieves usually aren't exactly the smartest people.
The German Federal Police has nothing to gain by lying about this incident. They explicitly investigated the possibility of foreign sabotage, found the perpetrators, and concluded that it was just regular theft. Sometimes a horse is just a horse, even when there are zebras running around.
> The German Federal Police has nothing to gain by lying about this incident.
And yet, there are multiple different theories floating around on who bombed North Stream. The police and DA assume that Ukrainians were behind this mess, possibly under orders of back-then UA army chief Zaluzhnyi according to leaks and rumors, but official communication on that has been ... lacking and that's putting it mildly. It doesn't help that there are credible suspicions of Russia being behind it either, the only theory I'd move to the "conspiracy bin" is that it was a CIA operation.
When it comes to anything involving this war, there really is no reason to trust anyone.
> They explicitly investigated the possibility of foreign sabotage, found the perpetrators, and concluded that it was just regular theft. Sometimes a horse is just a horse, even when there are zebras running around.
I agree... but still, the timing is so incredibly close that it's just as possible that for once the cable thieves were capable of good OPSEC practices.