It's such a cultural cliche of the mustache twirling villain to tie the damsel to the train tracks to get run over by the impending train, but was that based on real occurrences? Or some writer in the 19th century come up with the idea when looking at trains one day?
This has come up a few times in the past. /u/Searocksandtrees has a roundup of a few past answers on the topic here.
This came up recently as well:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bice6e/what_was_the_origin_of_a_moustachetwirling/