Great Train Robbery Anniversary
By tony leather, 9th Aug 2012 | Follow this author
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This special Post Office train - the Up Special - had run, trouble-free, nightly for 125 years until being brought to a halt by a falsely glowing red light at 0315 GMT in Buckinghamshire, UK, two hours before dawn on Aug. 8, 1963.
Great Train Robbery Anniversary
Thieves ambushed the Glasgow to Euston mail train and stole over $7,000,000 in used, untraceable banknotes in the biggest ever raid on a British train. The thing was that most of the 75 mail sorters working on the train were unaware of the 20 minute robbery, on August 6th 1963.
The thieves, you see, had uncoupled the engine and front two carriages before heading for the one mile distant Bridego Bridge, where the lorry was waiting for the 120 mail and money bags that the robbers snatched from the second carriage after restraining the four postal workers inside.
This special Post Office train - the Up Special - had run, trouble-free, nightly for 125 years until being brought to a halt by a falsely glowing red light at 0315 GMT in Buckinghamshire, UK, two hours before dawn on Aug. 8, 1963. Royal Mail train conductor Jack Mills stopped the train to investigate an unexpected red light.
Suddenly, he was surrounded by15 ski-masked and helmeted figures who, in less than 15 minutes had emptied the train of $7,145,600 in bank notes, many old ones destined for incineration. The bandit headquarters were 120 miles away at Leatherslade Farm in Buckinghamshire, to where the gang retreated.
In the farmhouse they counted the cash, even using it in a game of Monopoly, but in their jubilation about the successful heist they got sloppy with the clean-up, failing miserably in the bid to burn down the building, in which police later found everyone's fingerprints.
12 of the 15-strong team were subsequently captured and arrested, though the infamous Ronnie Biggs engineered a 1965 own jail break, after which police forces world-wide hunted him in vain until 1974, when Jack Slipper - Scotland Yard investigator - discovered a drastically, surgically altered Biggs in Brazil in 1974, though, Brazilian authorities refused to extradite the iconic robber who in 2001 finally surrendered to British police.
Much of the stolen lot was never recovered, and speculation was rife for years about where it might have gone, but nobody really knows, and Biggs claimed to have no idea. This was undoubtedly the most outrageous, daring and profitable robbery for the thieves ever recorded up that time in UK history, and in all honesty many sympathised with the thieves.
If it was old money anyway, what really was the difference, some asked, but the most gripping aspect of this iconic robbery was the ongoing vanishing act of Ronnie Biggs, and those missing millions. Will anyone ever own up to knowing where all that cash went?
Comments
9th Aug 2012 (#)
Your memory is very sharp,we should learn lesson from such things as you shared
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