Great Train Robberies of the Old West - Paperback

During the 1800s trains carried the nation's wealth throughout the east, but no one thought to rob a speeding train until 1866. In 1870 the first western train was robbed in Nevada and within hours a second train was robbed. Railroads made every alteration to their cars and changed every procedure they could imagine to thwart the robbers, but to no avail. Robbing trains became epidemic over the next five decades, even when the legislatures made train robbery a capital crime. A few of the hundreds of train robberies stand out as thrilling and dangerous affairs, and the greatest of these (15-20) are included in this book.

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Rails reached the West toward the end of the 1860s, and it wasn't long before road agents graduated from robbing stagecoaches to robbing trains. For outlaw gangs, there was no venture riskier than a train robbery. But, then again, no other line of work offered such potential for instant wealth.Great Train Robberies of the Old West is an action-packed collection of gangs too notorious, hauls too large, and murders too cold-blooded to fade into obscurity.