About 35 years ago I was waiting for a train in the Hunter Valley. A coal train had stopped at the platform It was hauled by four locomotives. I am not sure how long it was , but it was long.
This is a diesel locomotive of the Grand Trunk Western Railroad. In my youth this line ran between Detroit and Pontiac, Michigan adjacent to my grandparents property. If my grandpa only new how many of the vegtables from his garden got splattered on the tracks by the steel wheels! But I think he knew. Kids back then were much less sheltered. They just said get off the tracks when the train's coming.
We lived in student housing at Michigan State University, Lansing, adjacent to the GT RR main line when the overpasses had Grand Trunk changed by graffiti to Grand Funk!
I've heard the rock bank Grand Funk Railroad, with Michigan roots, created their name as a spin off of the Grand Trunk.
When a rail tunnel under the English Channel opened in 1994, Great Britain was linked to the European mainland for the first time since the Ice Age. Built at a cost of $16 billion, the 31-mile tunnel between Folkestone, England, and Coquelles, France, allowed Eurostar passengers to travel between London and Paris in just two-and-a-half hours and without the need for ferry transport. Nicknamed the “Chunnel,” the world’s longest undersea tunnel was named one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Daring Train Robberies From high-profile capers by the likes of Jesse James and Butch Cassidy to a raid by a gang of Indian political dissidents, find out more about six of history’s most audacious rail heists. Jesse James’ Iowa Train Robbery Notorious outlaw Jesse James is best remembered as a bank robber, but he was also one of the first bandits to hold up a moving train. The earliest of these heists came on the evening of July 21, 1873, near Adair, Iowa. After gathering information on the train schedule, James and his gang loosened a section of track on the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railway. As their target rounded a blind curve, the thieves used a rope to dislodge the track, causing the locomotive to derail and topple into a ditch. The crash killed the engineer and badly injured another man, but the rest of the cars lurched to a stop on the tracks. Disguised behind white cloth masks, two of the robbers—most likely Jesse and his brother, Frank—boarded the train cars and sought out a safe belonging to the U.S. Express Company. The gang had been led to believe it would contain a large cache of gold bullion, but upon opening it they found only a meager $2,000. Disappointed, the men resorted to robbing the stunned passengers of their money and valuables. Despite its modest haul, the Adair robbery shocked the public for its sheer boldness, and went a long way toward establishing Jesse James’ reputation as a folk hero and celebrity criminal.
The Great Train Robbery of 1963 The biggest train robbery in British history came in 1963 when a gang of 15 thieves stole more than £7 million in banknotes—the equivalent of $60.5 million today—from a Royal Mail train. In the early morning of August 8, the robbers rigged a false red signal light near a section of track called Sears Crossing. When the locomotive stopped at the light, more than a dozen men in ski masks appeared, beat the driver with a metal rod and uncoupled most of the cars. After forcing the driver to move the remaining cars to a rendezvous point a mile up the track, the thieves formed a human chain and quickly transferred 120 bags of money—most of them containing bills set to be removed from circulation—into three waiting vehicles. After escaping the scene, the robbers hid out for several days in a nearby farmhouse, where they celebrated by playing Monopoly with their two-and-a-half tons of stolen cash. Spooked by the high police presence in the area, the men eventually divided the loot and split up. Police were later called to the scene, where they discovered heaps of evidence—including fingerprints on the gang’s Monopoly board—that helped them track down the thieves. Twelve of the gang members were eventually arrested and sentenced to a total of 307 years in prison.
The Great Gold Robbery of 1855 Most train robberies are high-profile crimes committed by armed bandits, but the Great Gold Robbery was the railway equivalent of a cat burglary. The heist was discovered in May 1855 in Paris, when authorities found that the gold in four lock boxes shipped from London had been partially replaced with lead shot. The boxes had been kept in double-locked safes and showed no signs of having been tampered with. At some point during the train journey between England and France, around 12,000 British pounds worth of gold bullion—the equivalent of some $1.5 million in modern-day currency—had simply vanished. As police would later learn, the crime was a carefully planned inside job. Working with a stationmaster and a train guard, masterminds Edward Agar and William Pierce had obtained wax imprints of the safe keys and painstakingly made copies. On the night of the robbery, the men disguised themselves as gentlemen and boarded the train in London carrying luggage filled with lead. Once in transit, Agar and Pierce stowed away in the baggage car and used their copied keys to open the safes. After switching the gold with their dummy lead weights, they resealed the boxes and disguised the loot in their luggage before exiting the train in Dover. The heist would have been a perfect crime, but Agar later confessed to authorities after he was arrested for a separate offense. Police rounded up his accomplices shortly thereafter.
They were William Pierce, an ex-railway employee, who originated the idea; George Agar, an experienced and worldly criminal who masterminded the operation, pulling together all the strands essential to mount a viable project; George Tester, the railway clerk who enabled the gang to make duplicate keys of the Chubb safe aboard the train; of course, they would need another vital man on the inside — this was the train’s guard, a man called Burgess. Burgess had to make sure all the gang’s essential accoutrements were loaded in the guard’s van and to allow the men access to do their work. The whole operation went nicely to plan, the perpetrators returning to London from Dover the following day with their ill-gotten haul. However, the whole thing unravelled the following year, only because Agar’s girlfriend (possibly ex-girlfriend) — one Fanny Kay — who was recruited to act as a receiver failed to get a payment from Pierce, and blew the whistle to the governor of Newgate Prison. By the time of the trial, Agar had already been convicted to transportation for life from a completely separate incident, that of passing a false cheque (involving the notorious bent barrister James Saward, aka Jim the Penman). Pierce, Tester and Burgess were sentenced to 14 years transportation. This is the barest outline of the story. There is more on Wikipedia
