Australian Train Heist Mysteries

In December 1973, two men in black stopped a train in the rainforest above Cairns, took the track workers' wages off it at gunpoint and vanished down a drain into the scrub. Thirty-five years earlier and half a state away, a mine payroll was lifted out of a locked mail van on the dark run to Mount Isa, so cleanly that a full day went by before anyone knew it was gone. Two railways, two payrolls, and two impeccable railway heists.

This week on Strewth, the Phantoms of the Line.

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Sources:

  1. "MAIL TRAIN ROBBERY. £3,000 IN NOTES STOLEN. North Queensland Haul." Brisbane, 31 August 1938.https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/42110600

  2. "MAIL TRAIN ROBBERY. BRISBANE DETECTIVES. Called In To Assist." Brisbane, 4 September 1938. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/62172323

  3. ABC News, "Mystery of Australia's Great Kuranda rail robbery remains unsolved 50 years on," 2023.

  4. Queensland Police Museum, "FROM the VAULT - Silk Yards and a Railway Guard,"

  5. The Workshops Rail Museum (Queensland Museum), "Railway Mysteries," David Mewes, 25 June 2014. https://blog.qm.qld.gov.au/2014/06/25/railway-mysteries/ Secondary (retrospective features)

  6. The Cairns Post, "Cairns mystery: 1973 Kuranda rail armed robbery," Pete Martinelli, 2018.

  7. ABC News, "Deathbed confession solves 66-year-old robbery case," 10 February 2005.

 

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