August 8: Fifteen masks, one train, and the dream thief

On August 8, 1963, a gang of 15 masked robbers stopped a Royal Mail train in Buckinghamshire and made off with 2.6 million pounds in bank notes. Tonight's film: Inception (2010).

There is something about a well-planned robbery that always gets me. Not the violence, not the money. The part where every piece clicks into place. Anyone who has tried to assemble anything complicated, a project, a piece of software, knows the feeling. When the plan works. Tonight is about exactly that motion.

In the early hours of Thursday, August 8, 1963, around three in the morning, a crew of 15 masked robbers stopped a Royal Mail service in Buckinghamshire, at Sears Crossing. The train was running the Glasgow-to-London route, carrying postal packages. The crew had rigged the signal, so the driver, Jack Mills, braked. Then they held him at gunpoint and forced him to drive the locomotive to the nearby Bridego bridge, where the trucks were already waiting. In 30 minutes they offloaded 120 sacks holding 2.6 million pounds in bank notes. The job was organized by Bruce Reynolds, and behind the plan stood an inside informant, a postal worker known only as the “Ulsterman”. In today’s money, those 2.6 million pounds are roughly 58 million. There has never been a bigger train robbery in the country since.

What makes this case more than a crime file to me is the workshop craft. Laid-in intelligence. Signal work. The timetable. A halted train, a redirected locomotive, a pre-staged human chain that pulls the cargo out in half an hour. All of it on a target that was still moving.