Steve Mensing, Editor
♦ Frequently the Rowan Free Press receives email inquiries from historical buffs interested in train robberies and the plain curious about Salisbury’s “Great Train Robbery of April 29th 2012″. Most questions about the Salisbury Train Robbery fall into the following categories:
• Where can I find the Rowan Free Press story about the train robbery?
• When was the last recorded train robbery in the United States prior to the train robbery in Salisbury?
• Where was the train robbed in Salisbury going? Where did it travel from?
Here are our responses to these questions:
• At the time of “Salisbury, N.C.’s Great Train Robbery of April 29th 2012″ the Rowan Free Press was just getting underway and did not do crime stories. That didn’t occur until 2013 when we made a decision to write about Salisbury and Rowan County’s crime due the fact we noticed a fair amount of Salisbury’s crimes going unreported or reduced to nameless one sentence lines. Many of our readers believed this underreporting created a false aura of security about a very dangerous city. We are not beholden to those who hustle real estate, maintain the “8 block” status quo, or promote a highly dysfunctional City Hall failing to provide adequate police protection for its citizens in both “8 block” and its surrounding communities.
Our first article about Salisbury’s “Great Train Robbery of April 29th 2012″ occurred after the three train robbers pleaded guilty to the Salisbury train robbery in Federal Court:
http://rowanfreepress.com/2013/12/19/three-men-plead-guilty-to-salisbury-train-robbery/
Here is the FBI press release from the FBI website about Salisbury’s April 29th 2012 train robbery:
http://www.fbi.gov/charlotte/press-releases/2013/rowan-county-men-plead-guilty-to-train-robbery
• Our response to the question “when was the last recorded train robbery in the United States prior to the train robbery in Salisbury?”:
From what we were able to determine from the historical record of train robberies in the United States, the last train robbery occurring prior to the Salisbury’s claim to fame was the “B&O Zoot Suit Bandits Train Robbery of 1949″ that took place near Martinsburg, West Virginia. That train robbery happened some 63 years prior to Salisbury’s train robbery.
The last “moving” train robbery occurred in 1949 when a pair of bandits from Youngstown, Ohio boarded a Baltimore & Ohio passenger train from Washington, DC to Detroit. In the mountains of West Virginia near Martinsburg. “Lu” Ramsdell and his Zoot Suit Gang stopped the train to stick up nearly 150 passengers and crew. Accounts say the gang pistol-whipped several and shot at others before they fled the train to rob a bar and steal getaway cars. Ramsdell and his Zoot Suit Gang finally were caught a few blocks shy of the White House in Washington, D.C.
Unless a train is robbed in a yard or at a depot, we are less likely to see a “moving” train robbery due to today’s high-speed trains.
• The final question: “Where was the train robbed in Salisbury going and where did it travel from?”:
The route the Norfolk Southern train traveled was from Columbia, South Carolina, to Asheville, North Carolina.
Robbing trains is a risky business especially since the Norfolk Southern Railroad is known to have top-flight criminal investigators and the fact that the FBI involves themselves in railroad crimes due to the interstate nature of this form of commerce.
