Yes, it reads like a Victorian Era Oceans 11. One of the biggest things I remember about it was that they didn't even consider doing anything but stealing the keys to the safe. It wasn't "pickable" given their technology level, explosives weren't powerful enough to open it and it was massive enough to make brute force measures infeasible.

The idea of a train moving from London to Dover at a speed high enough to make a robbery difficult was ,until recently, almost unimaginable!