How Queen Elizabeth survived an assassination more than 50 years ago in Australia when a gang tried to derail her royal train
- Queen Elizabeth II was almost killed in an assassination attempt 50 years ago
- The Queen and Prince Philip were travelling from Sydney to Orange on train
- Halfway through the journey they were narrowly saved from the ‘Lithgow Plot’
- Would-be assassins, possible IRA supporters, had laid a large log over the tracks
- The attempt was kept a secret from the public and the royal family for 40 years
As the world remembers the extraordinary life of Queen Elizabeth II, Australians can recall the ‘greatest unsolved mystery’ of her reign – an attempted assassination just outside Sydney more than 50 years ago.
Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were travelling from Sydney to Orange, in NSW’s central west, as part of their 1970 Australian tour when they were victims of the ‘Lithgow Plot’.
The royal couple were moving across the Blue Mountains in the Commissioner’s Train on April 29, 1970, when about halfway through their journey the train came to a halt.
Queen Elizabeth II narrowly avoided an assassination attempt while travelling from Sydney to Orange in 1970 (pictured the royal couple arriving in Sydney in 1970)
The 1970 assassination attempt, more than 50 years before Her Majesty’s death, was hidden for almost 40 years
Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip didn’t know it at the time but they had only narrowly avoided death thanks to the train’s slow pace.
Former Detective Superintendent Cliff McHardy said would-be assassins had laid a large log across the train tracks where the royal couple were due to cross, in hopes of derailing the locomotive.
Fortunately, the driver had braked the slow-moving train immediately, causing the train to slide almost 700 feet before coming to a halt at a level crossing.
The train remained on its track and didn’t suffer any significant damage.
A security train that travelled through the area an hour before the royals didn’t see the log.
‘If the train had reached its normal speed it would have plunged off the tracks and into an embankment. My investigations showed that the log was deliberately placed on the tracks,’ Mr McHardy told Daily Mail in 2009.
The ‘Lithgow Plot’ saw would-be assassins lay a large log over train tracks the Queen and Prince travelled over (pictured, the Queen greeting people outside Town Hall in Sydney in May, 1970)
Due to the timing of the scheme, he suspects the killer move was planned with the help of insiders and possibly orchestrated by Australian Irish Republican Army sympathisers.
He added the whole attempt was hidden both from the public and the royal family for almost 40 years to save the Australian Government from embarrassment.
Mr McHardy, who was the investigating officer on the case, said he decided to reveal the truth to help crack the ‘greatest unsolved mystery of my career’.
The assassination attempt is believed to have been orchestrated by Australian Irish Republican Army sympathisers (pictured, the Queen in Sydney in May, 1970)
While he understands why the attempt had to be kept a secret, the former detective said the attempted assassination cover-up meant police could never hunt down the criminals.
‘We never came up with any decent suspects because if we interviewed people we seemed to be talking in riddles,’ he said. ‘We couldn’t disclose what our inquiries were about.’
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