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They make train robberies look so easy in the movies, don’t they? You jump on to a train with guns a-blazin’ and a bandana covering your face, rob the safe and jump off, never to be caught. But in real life, the gangs who robbed trains were almost always caught and brought to justice. Here are a few of their stories.
Photo from History of the James-Younger Gang
Police had no clue what had happened and a two-month investigation ensued. Hundreds of people were questioned without any hope of a lead, but by August, suspicion fell on Edward Agar. Agar was sent to prison for passing a fake check, but wanted to make sure that the mother of his child had money to provide for the young one. He informed her that she would be receiving £7,000 from a colleague of his, and when the money didn’t show, he blew the whistle on the whole operation. He and the colleague, William Pierce, had hatched a complicated plot to steal the gold years earlier. They involved a clerk in the railway office when they found out that he briefly had possession of the keys that locked the boxes the gold was sealed in; the clerk was able to get the keys to Agar who made an impression of them in wax and later had the keys replicated.
There was a second key to the safes that wasn’t quite as easy to get. Agar ended up sending a £200 box of bullion on the same route (under an assumed name, of course), then showed up to collect it and watched the clerk carefully to see where he got the second key to the safe. Turned out it wasn’t quite as complicated as they thought – the key was simply stored in a cupboard that wasn’t very well guarded at all. When the time came, Agar and Pierce strolled right into the office when it was unoccupied and made a quick wax imprint of the key.
They brought the lead shot onto the train in carpet bags; Pierce got into a first class carriage and Agar boarded with the train’s guard, James Burgess, who was in on the whole thing. Agar took the iron bars off with a mallet and chisel, replaced the gold bars with lead shot, replaced the iron bars and stuck a new wax seal on the box to make it look like it had never been tampered with.
When Agar turned Pierce in, police recovered about £2,000 of the £12,000 worth of gold stolen.
Michael Crichton later based his novel The Great Train Robbery on the incident, which was turned into a movie starring Sean Connery as William Pierce. (pictured)
Photo from MGMHD.
On October 6, 1866, the Reno brothers jumped onto an Ohio and Mississippi Railway train in Indiana and emptied one of the safes. They tossed another one out the window so they could take it with them, and then they jumped off of the train, completing the first train robbery in the United States. It was definitely a catching trend – in the two weeks following the Reno brothers’ first moving holdup, two more trains were robbed. A passenger testified that he saw the faces of two of the robbers from the first holdup, but after he was shot and killed, other passengers clammed up and none of the burglars were charged. At least, not at that time. After their fifth robbery a couple of years later, the Pinkertons finally caught up with the Reno brothers. Ten agents were waiting on the train to bust the boys, and although most of them escaped, they were arrested the next day.
Some members of the gang were hanged, but a lynch mob got to the others before official justice could be served.
They didn’t pull it off, though – the gang left the train rife with fingerprints, and left all kinds of evidence littered about the farmhouse they took refuge in for five days in Buckinghamshire. Not only were fingerprints found, they were allegedly found on a Monopoly board that the robbers had used to amuse themselves with while they were holed up. They used real money, of course.
13 of the gang members were eventually caught (that’s a few of them in the picture), although at least one of them didn’t stay caught for long. Ronnie Biggs escaped about 15 months into his prison sentence and moved to Paris, where he had plastic surgery. Then he moved to Australia and lived under the radar for quite a few years, until his identity was exposed, forcing him to move to Brazil. He lived there until 2001, when a series of strokes made him want to return to England to buy a proper pint before he died, although most people suspect he wanted the healthcare. He was returned to jail to finish out his sentence and is still there – Biggs was just denied parole on July 2 because the Justice Secretary felt that “Mr. Biggs is wholly unrepentant.”
Photo from HowStuffWorks
