London
need to know
(
68
km
)
distance from central London to the site
of the Great Train Robbery
(
£150,000
)
(
about £2.5m in today’s money) is what
each of the gang members received
(
307
)
total number of years the gang members
were sentenced to
easyJet
flies to London from 109 destinations.
See our insider guide on page 135. Book
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Two nights room only at the Hyde Park
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“
It was incredible how they
managed to carry out the
preparation for the crime with
such commando precision,
but were then sloppy enough to leave fingerprints
everywhere around the farmhouse,” says Woolley.
“
Somebody was supposed to torch the place to destroy all
the evidence, but whoever was employed to do that let the
gang down badly.”
It was only a matter of time before the majority of the
gang were rounded up and given the heaviest sentences
ever imposed for robbery in the United Kingdom at that
time. In Buckinghamshire, life slowly returned to its
normal quiet state. Leatherslade Farm was demolished in
the mid-1990s, its name changed and a public footpath
rerouted by the owners to deter curious visitors.
PHOTOS
CORBIS, GETTY
*
FOR T&CS SEE P175
As for Bridego, however, there is, incredibly, very little
on the bridge itself to suggest that anything notable ever
happened here. The only sign is a tiny health and safety
board put up by Network Rail which, in a rare act of
publicising a crime, has re-christened the arch: Train
Robbers Bridge. Other than that, the area is entirely
unchanged from how it would have looked to the gang
who, for a few weeks back in the late summer of 1963,
were considered by huge swathes of the British public not
to be violent criminals, but lovable rogues who had got
away with the most audacious crime of all time.
“
I have to give them grudging respect,” adds Woolley,
now 72 and still giving talks on the robbery in and
around Buckinghamshire. “For the preparation at least,
if not for the execution. There’s no doubt in my mind that
the gang were vicious, greedy criminals but, despite that,
you have to say that they almost certainly carried out the
crime of the century.”
For more information, go to visitbuckinghamshire.org
THE HIDEOUT
09
By the time the police
arrived at Leatherslade
Farm, the robbers had
taken off
10
Thinking the property
would be torched, the
thieves left their
fingerprints all over it
09
10
Horwood House
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