In many old Western movies, robbing a train seems easy, glorious, rewarding, brave even.

For over a hundred years, captivated audiences have watched from their living rooms or local

theaters as robbers on screen, climb onto the roofs of trains, run across their tops,

their cowboy hats perfectly in place, eyes gleaming through the black and white film,

before dropping into the locomotive cabin, brandishing their guns, and getting away with bags

of money. The robbers grinned smugly and tip their hats. They've just made millions. In these movies,

the line between villain and hero becomes blurred. The wild west of train robberies looks like a

world where riches and revenge are just sitting around for those brave enough to come and take them.

But there is one glaringly obvious thing that allows these stories to be so gleaming, so shiny and so simple.

They are movies.

Works of fiction.

The characters have been designed to be the perfect amount of charming and defiant.

Their backstories explain to us so that we can empathize with their character and understand why they would commit a crime like this.

In their world, we forgive them. We root for them. In movies, the crimes are penciled into the script and rehearsed.

Every detail planned out and practiced. A satisfying ending to the story is perfectly engineered before the movie is ever shot.

The danger and thrill is artificial, but real crime is far more precarious.

Real humans are much messier, and real life is not rehearsed.

The choices we make, be they right, wrong, or devastating, are permanent, and they stay with us forever.

Welcome to National Park After Dark.

Welcome. Welcome, everybody to another episode of National Park After Dark. I'm Cassie.

And I'm Danielle. And I'm not trying to copy you from last week, but we're doing another train story. And it sounds like a train robbery story.

In the Pacific Northwest. In the same story.

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