Ronnie Biggs, the former fugitive who helped stage Britain’s “Great Train Robbery” in 1963, has been released from prison, marking the end of a criminal saga that has played out over 40 years and across four continents. Biggs and 14 other men robbed a Royal Mail train of 2.6 million pounds
Tag Archives: train
‘Great Train Robber’ Ronnie Biggs released to die
Ailing "Great Train Robber" Ronnie Biggs — one of the most notorious British criminals of recent decades — was due to be formally released from prison to his death bed Friday after being granted his freedom on compassionate grounds. Biggs, who is gravely ill with severe pneumonia, is already being treated at a hospital in Norwich, eastern England, where he was moved on Tuesday
Scenes of Martian Redness in Australia
“If a kangaroo accidentally gets hit by the train, you don’t really feel it,” conductor Scott Fels informs me as the scrublands and giant termite mounds of the Australian Outback whisk by. “But if the train drivers see a camel on the tracks, believe me, they get away from the windows.” Camels in the Outback Yes indeed. There are estimated to be over a million of these ungulates roaming at will through the desert, descendants of the original camel caravans led by Afghan drivers in the 1860s and 1870s
Cheney’s Fall From Grace
Geo rge Bush’s sense of humor has always run more to frat-house gag than art-house irony, so he may not have appreciated the poetic justice any more than the legal justice on display in the Libby verdict. Or, to be more precise, the Cheney verdict.
Mumbai gunman pleads guilty in court
The lone surviving gunman captured during last year’s terrorist assault on Mumbai confessed his involvement in the attacks in court Monday. Mohammed Ajmal Kasab is one of 10 Pakistani nationals who police said unleashed terror on India’s financial capital for four days and three nights in November
Disney World monorail crash kills driver
A monorail train at Walt Disney World crashed into the back of another train early Sunday, killing one driver, according to an amusement park spokesman and a witness interviewed by CNN. The crash occurred about 2 a.m.
Death toll climbs in Italy train explosion
The death toll climbed to at least 12 in a gas explosion on a freight train in western Italy, officials said Tuesday. A child was among those killed, said Antonio Garufi, a local government official. The number of injured had risen to 36, with 16 in critical condition.
Metro driver called a hero who saved lives in crash
The head of Washington’s mass transit system praised as a "hero" the driver who was killed in Monday’s crash when her train struck another that was parked on the tracks. “She saved lives,” said Metro General Manager John Catoe at a memorial service Friday for Jeanice McMillan. McMillan was one of nine people killed when her train, under automatic computer control, apparently failed to register a signal and avoid a collision with a train that had stopped near a curve between two stations
D.C.’s Metro Rail Crash and America’s Aging Transit System
Investigators are still sorting through the wreckage of Monday’s crash of two Metro rail cars in Washington, D.C., the deadliest in the system’s 33-year history, which killed nine people and injured scores of others. Federal officials said on Tuesday that the train that rear-ended another was an older model that lacked equipment that might have helped avert the collision and, according to the Washington Post, had been overdue for needed brake work
Metro crash ‘like we hit a concrete wall,’ passenger says
People who were aboard the Washington subway trains that wrecked Monday described scenes of severely injured victims and of passengers trying to help one another.