Great Train Robbery, (August 8, 1963), in British history, the armed robbery of £2,600,000 (mostly in used bank notes) from the Glasgow–London Royal Mail Train, near Bridego Bridge north of London.
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Bandits, cheats, desperados, hobos, ravagers, renegades — you name the hooligan, and the Wild West has it in spades. There are plenty of opportunities for these ne'er-do-wells to pillage and plunder in the mostly uncharted western lands, but robbing trains has become the trendiest.
At around 3.00am on 8 August 1963, a gang of armed criminals boarded a Royal Mail train en route to Euston station in London. Dangerous and organised, they escaped with a staggering £2.6 million (£50 million in today's money).
The Great Train Robbery of 1963 made some of the men who carried out the £2.6million heist household names, including the notorious Ronnie Biggs. But whilst 12 men were either jailed or fled, three individuals eluded police. Two, Harry Smith and Danny Pembroke, were later unmasked, but the third remained unidentified.
On 6 October 1866, brothers John and Simeon Reno staged what is generally believed to be the first train robbery in American history. Their take was $13,000 from an Ohio and Mississippi railroad train in Jackson County, Indiana.
For a variety of reasons the practice is less common in the 21st century, although a community of freight-train riders still exists. Typically, hoppers will go to a rail yard where trains stop to pick up and unload freight and switch out crew.
Mills never overcame the trauma of the robbery. After the robbery, the gang hid at Leatherslade Farm. The police found this hideout, and incriminating evidence, a monopoly board with fingerprints, led to the eventual arrest and conviction of most of the gang. The ringleaders were sentenced to 30 years in prison.
The Great Train Robbery was the robbery of £2.61 million (about £61 million today) from a Royal Mail train heading from Glasgow to London on the West Coast Main Line in the early hours of 8 August 1963 at Bridego Railway Bridge, Ledburn, near Mentmore in Buckinghamshire, England.
David Hanrahan's 2011 book tells the true story of the audacious 1855 robbery of more than 80 kg of large gold bars and coins from the London Bridge to Folkestone train.
CSX #8888, an SD40-2, ran away under power without a crew after the engineer incorrectly set the locomotive's dynamic brake and was unable to get back into the locomotive after it began moving.
The robbers escaped with an estimated £2.6 million, which would have been worth about £46 million today, which they split amongst themselves. Most of the cash has never been recovered.
The last major American train robbery was attempted on November 25, 1937, on a Southern Pacific Railroad's westbound Apache Limited out of El Paso, Texas.