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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/45605
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

## Make the railroad do the heavy lifting

This will sound weird, but the "train heist" tropes you are talking about are predicated on assumptions that are rather inconsistent with how railroads move goods. In particular, freight railroads are basically jumbo package delivery systems, with much more in common with a mail or parcel delivery service than anything else. (Stuff that moves in _unit train_ volumes is an exception to this rule, but not one your protagonist has to trouble herself with.)

With this in mind, we can ask ourselves "why go through all the pain of trying to rob the delivery truck, when your protagonist can simply get their quarry delivered to their proverbial doorstep instead?" Your description of them as a "guile heroine" sounds precisely suited to social engineering attacks on the people and systems responsible for determining how cars are _routed_ through the network. Once she gets the system to misroute the target car to her, then she can simply collect the goods in broad daylight, and very few witnesses would be any bit the wiser to what just happened. (Of course, repeating this runs the risk that the lost-car desk catches up to her scheme, as the cars in question would be reported to the railroad's lost-and-found, basically.)

There is also the option of getting the car to be routed as a _bad order_ car, either through physical sabotage (of the target railcar) or information warfare. This has the potential to defeat even the heaviest of armed security due to the dilemma it poses for the crew: either delay the shipment by _days_ to chase a broken-down (or "broken-down") railcar to a shop, or leave the car behind in order to get the rest of the shipment to its destination in a timely fashion.

Original score: 6