Train Robbery

The theft of money or valuables carried aboard trains, a crime that became especially common in the nineteenth century and remains closely associated with outlaws of the American Old West. England experienced major train robberies in the mid nineteenth century, including the Great Gold Robbery of 1855, in which a train travelling from London to Boulogne lost more than twelve thousand pounds worth of gold and money. In the United States the offense peaked in the decades after the Civil War, with the first widely recognized postwar robbery occurring in Indiana in 1866 and the James-Younger Gang's 1873 robbery near Adair, Iowa becoming one of the most famous. Heavy investment in railroad security and more organized law enforcement made the crime largely obsolete in the United States by the 1930s, though train theft persists in a modern form, typically targeting freight trains carrying commercial cargo such as electronics and textiles rather than passengers, with the Los Angeles Basin identified as a current hotspot.