Credit: Nick Ut / Contributor via Getty
A Singapore-based shipper filed two lawsuits against Union Pacific for having $181,000 worth of merchandise stolen or contaminated while aboard the company’s trains somewhere between St. Louis, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, according to court filings.Ocean Network Express, the Singapore-based shipper, claims in the first suit that $166,060 of L-Arginine, an amino acid supplement, was potentially contaminated when “The container was found at Los Angeles with doors open, the seal of the container having been breached during Union Pacific’s rail carriage of it.” The second lawsuit alleges theft of 360 solar panels worth a total of $15,796. It says the panels were “pilfered” while in Union Pacific’s custody.The suits, filed within the last two weeks in federal court, are the first known legal action relating to theft aboard Union Pacific trains in Los Angeles. The train robberies were an international news story in January because of the brazenness of the crimes, with discarded packaging littering the tracks and serving as visual evidence of the scale of the robberies. For a brief period, the robberies became a proxy issue for the intense debates around policing, crime, criminal justice reform, in American cities. At least some Union Pacific workers said mass layoffs of the railroad’s internal police force were at least partly to blame. In March, NBC’s Los Angeles affiliate reported newly-installed security cameras worked to stop the thefts.A spokesperson for Union Pacific said in a statement, “We're aware of the lawsuits filed by Ocean Network Express and are still reviewing the information.”
