Disappearance Of A Railway

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31652, 11 April 1968, Page 11

Disappearance Of A Railway

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright)

SAIGON, April 10.

“Who walked off with the railway?” This is the question perplexing Saigon officials in the wake of what may go down as one of the most audacious railroad robberies in history.

Instead of holding up a train, the robbers walked off with more than SUSIm worth of steel track and other railroad equipment. And they did it in broad daylight.

Government officials say South Vietnamese soldiers did most of the stealing, with help in at least one area from civil and military police. The theft occurred shortly after the Communists’ Tet offensive in three of the northern-most provinces of South Vietnam—Quang Tri, Quan Tin and Quang Ngai. It happened between February 5 and 28, but it was only recently that the losses were discovered by top Government and military officials in Saigon.

Experts estimate that the South Vietnamese Army units involved took a total of 12.6 miles of steel rails, 30,000 steel sleepers, 21 points and an undetermined number of railway tools, railway waggon doors, floorboards, and lighting fixtures. The total value could run as high as about 51.339,000. Some of the sleepers are reported to have turned up in bunkers being used to protect Government installations, others have been sold

on the open market in the provincial capitals of Quang Tri, Quan Tin, and Quang Ngai. With such wholesale losses it is feared that some of the valuable steel rails and sleepers would fall into Viet Cong hands. The sleepers would make excellent buttressing material for Viet Cong tunnels.

The robbery was on such a massive scale it could not have occurred without the complicity of a number of high-ranking Vietnamese Army officers in the northern provinces. Officials of South Vietnam’s national railways system, an autonomous organisation, have demanded a full-scale investigation. Mr Robert Komer, chief of the United States pacification programme in Vietnam, said he was unaware of the thefts and knew of no plans to rebuild the railroad between Da Nang and Dong Ha. “If there was pilfering, 1 will look into it,” he said, “but this wouldn’t worry me much because we're not counting on the railroad. “Coastal traffic through the northern provinces is considerable and we plan to rebuild the roads. They have much more mobility than the railroad.”