[Leanan]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')hieves have dismantled and carted away some 5 kms (3 miles) of disused rail track close to the German town of Weimar, railway operator Deutsche Bahn said on Friday.

The railway operator said the thieves would probably sell the tracks as scrap metal with the damage amounting to at least 200,000 euros ($241,500).

Deutsche Bahn said it had noticed the missing track after the mayor of a town alongside the train line phoned in to check if the dismantling was planned.

"This was a major criminal operation, because you cannot simply take the tracks and carry them away," said a spokesman for the rail operator.

[Free]

Funny that you post this, when I heard the news today I was quite shocked.
They made fun of it and it was sort of in the same segment as "Russian bra busts, 7 injured" or whatever are the joke news du jour, but this is dead serious in my opinion.

As you say this is just the beginning.
It both reflects the rising prices of commodities and increasing poverty.

Remember the looting in Iraq when they stole basically the whole electricity grid. Also in eastern Europe this is very common.

You simply can't maintain a highly valuable fragile infrastructure if there are enough people who have an interest in dismantling it.

[Raxozanne]

Wasn't the whole of Somalia dismantled in this way?

[Liamj]

http://www.inthewake.org/blog.html manages to find a positive spin on this..

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '.').Metal theft is also increasingly common in North America. In lower mainland British Columbia people are stealing thousands of pounds of aluminum in the diverse forms of goalposts, aluminum sockets on scoreboards, seating and pipes. In Toronto aluminum cans are being removed from blue boxes in such large quantities that the city has requested "bylaw-enforcement officers be moved to the overnight shift to monitor blue boxes"! ...

Eventually we won't even have to convince people to dismantle massive industrial centralized infrastructure, because it won't function and won't benefit them. All we'll have to do is figure out how to depave roads and turn them into gardens, deconstruct industrial machinery and turn them into fuel-efficient woodstoves, or dismantle cars and turn them into wind-powered lighting and pumping systems, and then share those skills so that people can do it themselves. ...