End of the line for train robber Biggs

Ronnie Biggs was a petty criminal who set out to transform his life with the daring heist of a mail train packed with money.

The plan worked in ways he could never have imagined.

He was part of a gang of at least 12 men that robbed a Glasgow-to-London Royal Mail train in the early hours of August 8, 1963, switching its signals and tricking the driver into stopping in the darkness. The robbery netted 125 sacks of banknotes worth £2.6 million — €3m at the time, or more than €36m today — and became known as “the heist of the century”.

Biggs, who died early yesterday aged 84, was soon caught and jailed, but his escape from a London prison and decades on the run turned him into a media sensation and something of a notorious British folk hero.

He lived for many years beyond the reach of British justice in Rio de Janeiro, where he would regale tourists and the media alike with stories about the robbery. He appeared to enjoy thumbing his nose at the British authorities and even sold T-shirts and other memorabilia about his role in the crime.

He was free for 35 years before voluntarily returning to England in 2001 on a private jet sponsored by The Sun newspaper.

Most of the Great Train Robbery gang were caught and sentenced to long terms in jail. Biggs got 30 years, but 15 months into his sentence he escaped from London’s Wandsworth Prison by scaling a wall with a rope ladder and jumping into a waiting furniture van.

Biggs fled to France, then to Australia and Panama before arriving in Rio de Janeiro in 1970.

Finally convinced that Biggs was a dying man, officials released him on August 7, 2009, a day before his 80th birthday. He had been living in a nursing home since.