The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is a thriller novel by Morton Freedgood, writing under the pseudonym John Godey. Morton Freedgood was a best-selling author who wrote The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and many other detective and mystery novels under the pen name John Godey. ...

Plot

It starts as a normal day at the subway in New York, but the normality is interrupted by an unexpected hijacking of a subway train (on the number 6 line). The police force is confused by the hijacking because: Ronin robbing a merchants house in Japan around 1860 (1) Robbery is the crime of seizing property through violence or intimidation. ... A rapid transit, underground, subway, tube, elevated, or metro(politan) system is a railway system, usually in an urban area, with a high capacity and frequency of service, and grade separation from other traffic. ... The 6 (Lexington Avenue Local) is a train line in the New York Subway. ...

• the subway is a closed system; there is no place to take the train to escape, and
• all subway trains have a dead-man's switch which requires a live person at the controls to keep the train running, thus preventing a hijacker from escaping away from the running train.

The police frantically pursue the train on the city streets to deliver the ransom of one million dollars as the police attempts to negotiate and distract their attention. Unknown to the police, the four hijackers led by a mercenary named Bernard Ryder and a disgruntled former motorman Harold Longman have disabled the dead-man's switch. Once the hijackers receive their ransom money, they send the train off at top speed toward the terminal station where it would crash and thus kill all the passengers. Previously, the hijackers have left the train and attempted to escape out of the subway tunnels with their ransom money. In thermodynamics, a closed system, as contrasted with an isolated system, can exchange heat and work, but not matter, with its surroundings. ... A dead mans switch (also known as - mainly in Britain - as a dead mans handle) is a device intended to take some action if the human operator becomes incapacitated in some way, a form of fail-safe practice. ... The term ransom refers to the practice of holding a prisoner to extort money or property extorted to secure their release, or to the sum of money involved. ...

Film adaptations

• The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
• The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1998)

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (also known as The Taking of Pelham 123) is a thriller movie released in 1974. ...

Trivia

• In real radio communications among the New York City Transit Authority's train crews, a 24 hour clock is used. Technically, this would have made the title train "Pelham 1323"

This is true nowadays, however when the film was made, the 12hr clock was still in use. (Redirected from 24 hour clock) The 24-hour clock, also referred to (only in the US) as military time or (only in the United Kingdom and now very rarely) as continental time is a convention of time-keeping in which the day runs from midnight to midnight and is divided...