True Stories #426 - The Great Train Robbery

August 8th, 1963 saw one of the greatest train heists in railroad history. But did the robbers get away with it?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm Seth Andrews, and what you're about to hear is
a true story. It was like a scene out of
a movie, a great train robbery that really happened between
the train's departure city of Glasgow, Scotland, and Euston station

(00:24):
in London. It was the eighth of August nineteen sixty three,
and the heist went down like this. The train was
a mail train. It carried letters and parcels bound for London,
sorted into different cars. Registered mail was obviously considered much
more valuable. Inside those envelopes and packages you would find

(00:47):
cash and checks and important documents. The Post Office kept
estimates for these high value packages. The number usually around
three hundred British pounds, but due to a holiday which
had just happened in Scotland, the total on the day
of this train robbery was two point three million, not

(01:08):
three hundred thousand. Now, if we adjust for seven decades
of inflation in US dollars, we're talking about forty million.
You can see why the train robbers really wanted to
pull this off. The train passed a spot called Layton Buzzard.
By the way. I had to look that up because

(01:28):
it was such a strange name. Apparently, Layton Buzzard is
a derivative of something like bow desert, which means beautiful clearing.
I don't know, I'll let you sort that out. It
was three in the morning at Layton Buzzard. The conductor,
Jack Mills, was cruising along on the track and he
saw a red signal ahead, not realizing that signal had

(01:51):
been rigged with a six volt battery. When Mills got out,
walked over to see what was going on. He saw
the cut cables and the battery, but before he could respond,
he was assaulted and thrown down a sharp embankment. The
co engineer was also knocked cold by a masked man.

(02:11):
He lay there in the engine room as the robbers
disconnected all but the forward high value cars and they
prepared to move the whole train to a better location
where the loot could be offloaded. One of the robbers
had been training for this day for months. He had
maneuvered his way onto other train engines and asked some

(02:32):
questions from unsuspecting employees. He thought he could operate the engine,
but all of those dials and switches on this particular
train were too much for him to navigate. They couldn't
go anywhere, so the engineer was revived and forced to
take the helm. Terrified post office workers on that train

(02:54):
were held at bay. The ones further back didn't even
realize a robbery was going on. At Bridego Bridge, the gang,
a human chain of robbers, removed one hundred and twenty
sacks containing two and a half tons of money loaded packages.
The post office employees were then told do nothing for

(03:17):
thirty minutes, don't move for a half an hour. Of course,
thirty minute seems like a very specific number. The police
certainly thought so, and so they began to assume that, hey,
the robbers layer must be within a half hour drive,
and they would be correct. That hideout was an old
farmhouse in Oakleigh, Buckinghamshire. The men had rented a place

(03:40):
called leather Slade Farm. The plan was to lie low
until things cooled down, and so for several days they
counted their money and celebrated their success. They even played
games of Monopoly using real money that they had grabbed
out of the envelopes, and all the while police were
gouring the countryside in search of those men and the

(04:03):
loot they had stolen. Now, coincidentally, the raf. The Royal
Air Force was conducting totally unrelated training flights in the area.
These pilots had no idea there was anything sketchy going
on underneath their planes. But the robbers in that barn
heard all the flybys and they got nervous, so they

(04:24):
decided to leave early. They split the money and scrambled away.
A nearby residence saw this suspicious activity at the barn
and reported it to police, and law enforcement arrived to
find abandoned food and provisions, sleeping bags, banknote rappers, post

(04:45):
office sacks, and even unopened pieces of registered mail still
waiting to be Pilford. But the robbers were gone. Yet
each of them would be found and arrested and convicted
in corp of law. The gang received a total of
three hundred seven years in prison. But how were these

(05:07):
admittedly clever criminals caught? I mean, they had pulled off
a successful heist, nobody had been killed. They literally engineered
a fast escape and found a hideaway. But these men
apparently were not smart enough to realize that fingerprints will

(05:28):
stick to a Monopoly game board. These men paid because
they played, and a piece of Hasbro paper boards was
imprinted with the identifiers that would send all of these
people to jail, keeping those men from making the mail

(05:49):
train a gravy train. And that's a true story. True
Stories podcast dot com