The robbery and aftermath made for a pretty good story...
Bruce Reynolds, Audacious Engineer of Great Train Robbery, Is Dead at 81 - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/world/europe/bruce-reynolds-leader-of-great-train-robbery-dies-at-81.html?hp&_r=0
"In the early morning of Aug. 8, 1963, a gang of 15 men stopped a Glasgow-to-London mail train about 45 miles short of its destination by tampering with a signal. The train, which usually carried large quantities of money in the second car behind the locomotive, was loaded even more heavily than normal because of a just-completed bank holiday in Scotland, and the thieves escaped with about 120 bags of cash, mostly in small bills, totaling about £2.6 million, or about $7 million at the time — the equivalent of about $60.5 million today.
"Mr. Reynolds, who was 31 at the time and known to the police as a burglar well-connected in the London underworld, had used insider information from the postal service to plan the heist, which he thought of as a painter would a masterpiece. Indeed, he referred to it in a 1996 interview as 'my Sistine Chapel.'"
Bruce Reynolds, Audacious Engineer of Great Train Robbery, Is Dead at 81 - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/world/europe/bruce-reynolds-leader-of-great-train-robbery-dies-at-81.html?hp&_r=0
"In the early morning of Aug. 8, 1963, a gang of 15 men stopped a Glasgow-to-London mail train about 45 miles short of its destination by tampering with a signal. The train, which usually carried large quantities of money in the second car behind the locomotive, was loaded even more heavily than normal because of a just-completed bank holiday in Scotland, and the thieves escaped with about 120 bags of cash, mostly in small bills, totaling about £2.6 million, or about $7 million at the time — the equivalent of about $60.5 million today.
"Mr. Reynolds, who was 31 at the time and known to the police as a burglar well-connected in the London underworld, had used insider information from the postal service to plan the heist, which he thought of as a painter would a masterpiece. Indeed, he referred to it in a 1996 interview as 'my Sistine Chapel.'"
The mail train robbed of about $7 million on Aug. 8, 1963 by a gang led by Bruce Reynolds. AP photo.
