Episode Details

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.

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.