Thu May 31, 2012 4:16 pm by MBI
I verified that the field office you listed does exist and there is an agent by that name based there, although you didn't post his full number so I couldn't call him to talk to him, and their dispatcher wouldn't connect me to him for some reason.
The national railroads are a jurisdictional nightmare with many overlapping areas. I just spoke to a transit cop I know who works with the railroad police a lot, he wasn't aware of a law regulating those locks or keys, but due to the jurisdictional overlaps he said there isn't any one place to look for such legislation. He said the most likely place to look under Federal law is in CFR 49 (Code of Federal Regulations, Title 49), but there could be related laws at the state level in different parts of the country. I just spent a couple hours reading through CFR 49 and the only reference I could find regarding locks, is simply that in certain circumstances, certain pieces of railroad property are required to be locked. It doesn't even specify how. But I'm not a legal expert.
I think someone just needs to talk to Agent Post and get the scoop right from him, rather than speculate. Hopefully he can direct us to the relevant piece of legal code, if it exists, that shows that posession of those locks or keys is regulated.
There is always the stolen property issue, but I don't know how one could prove it was stolen. I don't have my hands on the items in question to see if there are any markings that definitively show that it is their property and not a reproduction, as seems to happen sometimes with collectible locks and keys.