Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain by Alan Brooke, David Brandon Read Free Book Online Page B

against the person.
    The engine driver was very badly beaten after attempting to fight back and he received injuries which almost certainly shortened his life. Only a small amount of the stolen money was ever recovered and many people think that the robbery’s chief organiser and investor, who received the largest share of the proceeds, was never identified and obviously never brought to justice.
    Theft of railway property has been a constant problem from earliest times to the present. In the days when refreshment rooms and restaurant cars invariably used heavy-duty crockery, this disappeared in quite extraordinary quantities, as did cutlery. Light bulbs have always been a target of thieves and were stolen in large numbers, especially from carriages with closed compartments. The same type of compartment used to display the attractive publicity posters that older readers will remember. These were fixed above the seats and below the luggage racks and usually showed reproduction paintings or photographs of ‘holiday haunts’.
    Locals on a train travelling up the soot-laden steel-making district of the Don Valley out of Sheffield might be tempted to get away from it with a day out by train to sample the fleshpots of Cleethorpes or the boisterous delights of Blackpool. Elsewhere other passengers travelling, for example, through what were once similarly Stygian surroundings between Wolverhampton and West Bromwich on the Great Western Railway might succumb to the sun-kissed temptations of Torquay or Weston-super-Mare.
    These pictures were removed, framed and placed on the walls of homes right across the country. It is ironic to think that originals in good condition are now worth a King’s ransom. One enterprising fellow found that furniture makers would pay good prices for horsehair. The railways stuffed their seats with this material and so he raided Great Central Railway carriage sidings just outside Marylebone station in London, walking off with sacks of horsehair – until the police caught him.
    The railways need all manner of materials for their infrastructure and their operations, and many of these were, or still are, well worth the trouble of stealing. It is by no means unknown for stations and other buildings to have the lead stripped from their roofs. Canvas sheets and tarpaulins used to be required in vast numbers for covering freight wagons. They were also wanted illicitly for a wide range of other, non-railway, purposes, hence there was always a ready sale for these items. The farming fraternity in particular found them extremely useful for covering clamps of root crops and haystacks, for example. In 1951 the Eastern Region of British Railways had over 10,000 sheets missing and it was probably no coincidence that it served an area where there were large amounts of arable land.
    Steam locomotives had copper fittings which were always worth stealing. When steam locomotives were being withdrawn in huge numbers in the 1960s they were frequently stored in sidings awaiting the call to be scrapped.Obscure rural locations were often found with a view to avoiding the attention of metal thieves, but usually with little success, and the valuable portable non-ferrous parts might be removed and spirited away quickly and quietly. Lots of so-called railway enthusiasts entered engine sheds and brazenly stole number plates and nameplates, the latter in particular sometimes fetching five-figure sums in the twenty-first century.

The huge steam engine ‘graveyard’ at Barry Docks in 1970. These hulks rusted away for years, stripped of anything removable by genuine preservationists and also trophy-hunters. Miraculously many of these locomotives were rescued and have been restored to working order on Britain’s heritage railways.
    A real bonanza for the criminal community was the development of electric traction and electric signalling, because these both used substantial amounts of copper. Conduits containing copper wire for