a railway steamer from Folkestone to Boulogne-sur-Mer, northern France, and a train to complete the journey direct to Paris. The service ran at 8:00 am, 11:30 am and 4:30 pm; there was also an overnight mail service that left at 8:30 pm and a tidal ferry service. Periodically the line would carry shipments of gold from bullion merchants in London to their counterparts in Paris; these could be several hundredweights at a time. The bullion would be packed into wooden boxes, bound with iron hoops and with a wax seal bearing the coat of arms of the bullion dealers in question: Abell & Co, Adam Spielmann & Co and Messrs & Co. The agents who arranged the carriage of the gold, including collecting the bullion from the three companies and delivering it to London Bridge, were Chaplin & Co. The gold shipments always went on the 8:30 pm train. At Boulogne the bullion boxes were collected by the French agents before being transported by train to the Gare du Nord and then to the Bank of France. As a security measure, the boxes were weighed when they were loaded onto the guard's van, at Folkestone, on arrival at Boulogne and then again on arrival in Paris. The company's guard's vans were fitted with three patented "railway safes" provided by Chubb & Son. These were three-feet (0.91 m) square and made of inch-thick (2.5 cm) steel. Access to the safe was through its lid, which was hinged for access; the exterior had two keyholes, high on the front. Each of the three safes had the same pair of locks, meaning that only two keys were needed to open all three safes. Copies of the keys were held separately by SER officials at London Bridge and Folkestone, and the company ensured no individual could hold both keys at the same time. Participants The originator of the plan was William Pierce, a 37-year-old former employee of the SER who had been dismissed from its service after it was found that he was a gambler; he worked as a ticket printer in a betting shop after leaving the company. According to the historian Donald Thomas, Pierce was "a large-faced and rather clumsy man with a taste for loud waistcoats and fancy trousers. ... he was described as 'imperfectly educated'. The turf was his true schooling". The burglar and safe-cracker Edward Agar was just under