Railway post office - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

In the United States a railway post office, commonly abbreviated as RPO, was a railroad car that was normally operated in passenger service as a means to sort mail

Mail

Mail, or post, is a system for transporting letters and other tangible objects: written documents, typically enclosed in envelopes, and also small packages are delivered to destinations around the world. Anything sent through the postal system is called mail or post.In principle, a postal service...

en route, in order to speed delivery. The RPO was staffed by highly trained Railway Mail Service

Railway Mail Service

The United States Postal Service's Railway Mail Service was a significant mail transportation service in the US during the time period from the mid-19th century until the mid-20th century. The RMS, or its successor the Postal Transportation Service , carried the vast majority of letters and...

postal clerks, and was off-limits to the passengers on the train. In the UK, the equivalent term was Travelling Post Office (TPO).

From the middle of the 19th century, many American railroads earned substantial revenues through contracts with the U.S. Post Office Department (USPOD)

United States Postal Service

The United States Postal Service is an independent agency of the United States government responsible for providing postal service in the United States...

to carry mail aboard high-speed passenger trains; and the Railway Mail Service enforced various standardized designs on RPOs. In fact, a number of companies maintained passenger routes where the financial losses from moving people were more than offset by transporting the mail.

History

The world's first official carriage of mail by rail was by the United Kingdom's

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was the formal name of the United Kingdom during the period when what is now the Republic of Ireland formed a part of it....

General Post Office

General Post Office is the name of the British postal system from 1660 until 1969.General Post Office may also refer to:* General Post Office, Perth* General Post Office, Sydney* General Post Office, Melbourne* General Post Office, Brisbane...

in November 1830, using adapted railway carriages on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway

Liverpool and Manchester Railway

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway was the world's first inter-city passenger railway in which all the trains were timetabled and were hauled for most of the distance solely by steam locomotives. The line opened on 15 September 1830 and ran between the cities of Liverpool and Manchester in North...

. Sorting of mail en-route first occurred in the United Kingdom with the introduction of the Travelling Post Office in 1838 on the Grand Junction Railway

Grand Junction Railway

The Grand Junction Railway was an early railway company in the United Kingdom, which existed between 1833 and 1846 when it was merged into the London and North Western Railway...

.

In the United States, some references suggest that the first shipment of mail carried on a train (sorted at the endpoints and merely carried in a bag on the train with other baggage) occurred in 1831 on the South Carolina Rail Road

South Carolina Rail Road

The South Carolina Railroad was the direct successor of the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company, which had operated its 136-mile line from Charleston, South Carolina, to Hamburg, South Carolina, since 1833...

. Other sources state that the first official contract to regularly carry mail on a train was made with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad

Baltimore and Ohio Railroad

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was one of the oldest railroads in the United States and the first common carrier railroad. It came into being mostly because the city of Baltimore wanted to compete with the newly constructed Erie Canal and another canal being proposed by Pennsylvania, which...

in either 1834 or 1835. The United States Congress

United States Congress

The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Congress meets in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C....

officially designated all railroads as official postal routes on July 7, 1838. Similar services were introduced on Canadian railroads in 1859.
The Railway post office was introduced in the United States on July 28, 1862, using converted baggage car

Baggage car

A baggage car or luggage van is a type of railway vehicle often forming part of the composition of passenger trains and used to carry passengers' checked baggage, as well as parcels . Being typically coupled at the front of the train behind the locomotive, this type of car is sometimes described...

s on the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad

Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad

The Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad was the first railroad to cross Missouri starting in Hannibal in the northeast and going to St. Joseph, Missouri, in the northwest...

(which also delivered the first letter to the Pony Express

Pony Express

The Pony Express was a fast mail service crossing the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and the High Sierra from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, from April 3, 1860 to October 1861...

). Purpose-built Railway Post Office (RPO) cars entered service on this line a few weeks after the service was initiated. Their purpose was to separate mail for connection with a westbound stagecoach departing soon after the train's arrival at St. Joseph. This service lasted approximately one year. The first permanent Railway Post Office route was established on August 28, 1864, between Chicago, Illinois, and Clinton, Iowa

Clinton, Iowa

Clinton is a city in and the county seat of Clinton County, Iowa, United States. The population was 26231as of 2010. Clinton, along with DeWitt, Iowa , was named in honor of the seventh governor of New York, DeWitt Clinton. Clinton is the principal city of the Clinton Micropolitan Statistical...

. This service is distinguished from the 1862 operation because mail was sorted to and received from each post office along the route, as well as major post offices beyond the route's end-points.

George B. Armstrong, assistant postmaster at Chicago, originally came up with the idea of having mail processed and distributed while the mail was on board, en route in mail cars. With the assistance of Schuyler Colfax, Speaker of the House at the time, and A. N. Zevely, Third Assistant Postmaster General, he was duly authorized to test his ideas.

In 1869, the Railway Mail Service

Railway Mail Service

(RMS), headed by George B. Armstrong, was officially inaugurated to handle the transportation and sorting of mail aboard trains. Armstrong was promoted from a supervisory position in the Chicago post office following his experiments in 1864 with a converted route agent's car on runs between Chicago and Clinton, Iowa.

RPO car interiors, which at first consisted of solid wood furniture and fixtures, would also soon be redesigned. In 1879, an RMS employee named Charles R. Harrison developed a new set of fixtures that soon gained widespread use. Harrison's design consisted of hinged, cast-iron fixtures that could be unfolded and set up in a number of configurations to hold mail pouches, racks and a sorting table as needed for specific routes. The fixtures were also designed so they could be folded away completely to provide a wholly open space to carry general baggage and express shipments as needed by the railroads. Harrison followed through with manufacturing his design at a factory he opened in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin

Fond du Lac, Wisconsin

Fond du Lac is a city in Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin, United States. The name is French for bottom of the lake, for it is located at the bottom of Lake Winnebago. The population was 42,203 at the 2000 census...

in 1881.

The July 1, 1862, Pacific Railroad Act signed by President Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...

established government funding for the construction of a railroad from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean with the express idea of opening a main line mail route across the western frontier. The act was officially entitled "AN ACT to aid in the construction of a railroad and telegraph line from the Missouri river to the Pacific ocean, and to secure to the government the use of the same for postal, military, and other purposes," The Act opened the door to government funded railroad mail routes across the American continent.

By the 1880s, railway post office routes were operating on the vast majority of passenger trains in the United States. A complex network of interconnected routes allowed mail to be transported and delivered in a remarkably short time. Railway mail clerks were subjected to stringent training and ongoing testing of details regarding their handling of the mail. On a given RPO route, each clerk was expected to know not only the post offices and rail junctions along the route, but also specific local delivery details within each of the larger cities served by the route. Periodic testing demanded both accuracy and speed in sorting mail, and a clerk scoring only 96% accuracy would likely receive a warning from the Railway Mail Service division superintendent. Interurban

Interurban

An interurban, also called a radial railway in parts of Canada, is a type of electric passenger railroad; in short a hybrid between tram and train. Interurbans enjoyed widespread popularity in the first three decades of the twentieth century in North America. Until the early 1920s, most roads were...

and Streetcar systems were also known to operate RPOs. The Boston Elevated Railway

Boston Elevated Railway

The Boston Elevated Railway was a precursor first to the Metropolitan Transit Authority in Massachusetts, now the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, operating rapid transit, streetcars and buses in the Boston, Massachusetts area. It was formerly known as the West End Street Railway.The...

car being noted as making circuits of the city to pick up mail.

In the United States, RPO cars (also known as mail cars or postal cars) were equipped and staffed to handle most back-end postal processing functions. First class mail, magazines and newspapers were all sorted, cancelled when necessary, and dispatched to post offices in towns along the route. Registered mail was also handled, and the foreman in charge was required to carry a regulation pistol while on duty to discourage theft of the mail.

Standardization

Because of the physical and mental demands placed on RPO clerks, the Railway Mail Service pushed the adoption of standardized floor plans and fixtures for all RPO cars, with the first plans published in 1885. The RMS also pressed for improved lighting fixtures to help the clerks see the addresses on the mail they sorted, first by improving the reflectors in the 1880s, then calling for discontinuance of oil lamps

Kerosene lamp

The kerosene lamp is a type of lighting device that uses kerosene as a fuel. This article refers to kerosene lamps that have a wick and a tall glass chimney. Kerosene lanterns that have a wick and a glass globe are related to kerosene lamps and are included here as well...

in the 1890s and the first experiments with electric lighting in 1912. Clerks' safety was also of great concern to the RMS, with the first comprehensive statistics on work-related injuries published in 1877.

Through the second half of the 19th century, most RPO cars were painted in a somewhat uniform color scheme regardless of the railroad that owned or operated them. Most were painted white with trim in either buff, red or blue, which made the cars stand out from the other cars. By the 1890s, this practice had waned as railroads painted their RPO cars to match the rest of their passenger equipment. One RPO car that was displayed at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition

World's Columbian Exposition

The World's Columbian Exposition was a World's Fair held in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World in 1492. Chicago bested New York City; Washington, D.C.; and St...

in Chicago is one of the last known examples of the early white color scheme.

As the development of passenger cars progressed, so too did the development of RPO cars. The first plans for RPO car designs were based on light baggage car

Baggage car

frames and bodies, which sometimes resulted in catastrophe for RMS employees when the trains were involved in accidents. The RMS developed its first standards for car design in 1891 to address some of these issues. In 1912, the Railway Mail Service developed a set of strength requirements for new cars in an effort to push the car building companies into using steel

Steel

Steel is an alloy that consists mostly of iron and has a carbon content between 0.2% and 2.1% by weight, depending on the grade. Carbon is the most common alloying material for iron, but various other alloying elements are used, such as manganese, chromium, vanadium, and tungsten...

for the cars' major structural components and underframes. The core of the requirements was that each car should be able to withstand a buffer force of at least 400,000 pounds. This requirement was doubled to 800,000 pounds in a 1938 revision of the standards. The requirements were again strengthened in 1945 with specifications that precluded the use of aluminium

Aluminium

Aluminium or aluminum is a silvery white member of the boron group of chemical elements. It has the symbol Al, and its atomic number is 13. It is not soluble in water under normal circumstances....

for framing and major structural components. The 1945 revisions also included a requirement for end posts to prevent telescoping in the event of a collision. Car manufacturers adopted these requirements and carried them through to all other models of passenger cars that they built.
An interesting feature of most RPO cars was a hook that could be used to snatch a leather or canvas pouch of outgoing mail hanging on a track-side mail crane

Mail hook

A mail hook is an installation at a railroad where a mail sack can be hung, to be picked up by a passing train without the train having to stop. See further discussion at Railway Post Office....

at smaller towns where the train did not stop. The first US patent for such a device was awarded to L.F. Ward of Elyria, Ohio, on January 29, 1867. With the train often operating at 70 mph or more, a postal clerk would have a pouch of mail ready to be dispatched as the train passed the station. In a co-ordinated movement, the catcher arm was swung out to catch the hanging mail pouch while the clerk stood in the open doorway. As the inbound pouch slammed into the catcher arm, the clerk kicked the outbound mail pouch out of the car, making certain to kick it far enough that it was not sucked back under the train. An employee of the local post office would retrieve the pouch and deliver it to the post office.

Cancellation stamps

Most RPO cars had a mail slot on the side of the car, so that mail could actually be deposited in the car, much like using the corner mail box, while the train was stopped at a station. Those desiring the fastest delivery would bring their letters to the train station for dispatch on the RPO, knowing that overnight delivery would be virtually assured. The mail handled in this manner received a cancellation just as if it had been mailed at a local post office, with the cancel giving the train number, endpoint cities of the RPO route, the date, and RMS Railway Mail Service or PTS Postal Transportation Service

Postal Transportation Service

On October 1, 1949, the Post Office Department renamed the Railway Mail Service as the Postal Transportation Service . Although this branch of the service had been in charge of all transit mail, some parts had little to do with railroads, although they were still the most important part of the...

between the killer bars. Collecting such cancellations is a pastime of many philatelists and postal history

Postal history

Postal history is the study of postal systems and how they operate and, or, the study of postage stamps and covers and associated material illustrating historical episodes of postal systems...

researchers.

The Railway Mail Service organization within the Post Office Department existed between 1864 and September 30, 1948. It was renamed the Postal Transportation Service on October 1, 1948, and existed until 1960. After 1960, the management of railway post office routes as well as Highway Post Office

Highway Post Office

Due to the continual withdrawal of so many Railway Post Office trains, the Post Office Department decided to experiment with the distribution of mail on large buses, equipped somewhat like RPO cars. On February 10, 1941, experimental service started on the Washington, DC & Harrisonburg, Virginia...

routes, Air Mail Facility

Air Mail Facility

With the establishment of the first air-mail route in 1918, and the later additional routes, plus the accepted use of premium priced air mail by the public, it was only natural that the Railway Mail Service , being in charge of transit mail, was assigned the task of establishing Air Mail Field ...

, Terminal Railway Post Office

Terminal Railway Post Office

Terminal railway post offices were sorting facilities which were established by the Railway Mail Service to speed the distribution of parcel post. These offices were usually located in or near railroad stations in major cities or junction points...

, and Transfer Office

Transfer Office

Shortly before W.W.I, Transfer Clerks were assigned at some of the larger railroad junction points. These Transfer Office facilities were space exclusively used by Railway Mail Service and Postal Transportation Service clerks that were leased by railroad companies...

, were shifted to the Bureau of Transportation

Bureau of Transportation

The Bureau of Transportation of the United States Post Office Department was established in 1960. It was the successor to the Postal Transportation Service ; the PTS had responsibility for mail transportation contracting as well as employees assigned to Mobile Unit and stationary PTS facilities...

Decline and withdrawal

At its height, RPO cars were used on over 9,000 train routes covering more than 200,000 route miles in North America. While the majority of this service consisted of one or more cars at the head end of passenger trains, many railways operated solid mail trains between major cities; these solid mail trains would often carry 300 tons of mail daily.

After 1948, the railway post office network began its decline although it remained principal intercity mail transportation and distribution function within the Post Office Department (POD). There were 794 RPO lines operating over 161,000 miles of railroad in that year. Only 262 RPO routes were still operating by January 1, 1962. In 1942, the POD began experimenting with a highway version of the RPO to serve the same purposes along routes where passenger train service was not available. These highway post office (HPO) vehicles were initially intended to supplement RPO service, but in the 1950s and 1960s, HPOs often replaced railway post office cars after passenger train service was discontinued. When the post office made a controversial policy change to process mail in large regional "sectional centers," mail was now sorted by large machines, not by people, and the remaining railway post office routes, along with all highway post office routes, were phased out of service. In September 1967 the POD cancelled all "rail by mail" contracts, electing to move all First Class mail via air and other classes by road (truck) transport. This announcement had a devastating effect on passenger train revenues; the Santa Fe, for example, lost $35 million (US) in annual business, and led directly to the ending of many passenger rail routes.

After 113 years of railway post office operation, the last surviving railway post office running on rails between New York and Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

was discontinued on June 30, 1977. The last route with a railway post office title was actually a boat run that lasted a year longer. This Boat Railway Post Office

Boat Railway Post Office

Post was transported over water in the United States in the later nineteenth and the twentieth century.-Origins:Route Agents and, later, Railway Post Office clerks were placed on inland boat lines at a very early date; postmarks go back to 1857...

was the Lake Winnipesaukee RPO operating between The Weirs, New Hampshire

Weirs Beach, New Hampshire

Weirs Beach is a village within the city of Laconia in Belknap County, New Hampshire, United States. It is located on the southern shore of Lake Winnipesaukee. The cruise ship Mount Washington terminates there...

, and Bear Island

Bear Island (Lake Winnipesaukee)

Bear Island is the second largest island in Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, USA. In the summer it is accessible only by boat or helicopter because it is not connected to the mainland via a bridge. In the winter it can be reached by snowmobile...

on Lake Winnipesaukee

Lake Winnipesaukee

Lake Winnipesaukee is the largest lake in the U.S. state of New Hampshire. It is approximately long and from wide , covering — when Paugus Bay is included—with a maximum depth of ....

. The final date it operated with a postmark

Postmark

thumb|USS TexasA postmark is a postal marking made on a letter, package, postcard or the like indicating the date and time that the item was delivered into the care of the postal service...

was September 30, 1978.

Preservation

Many RPO cars have been preserved in railroad museums across North America; some of the cars are kept in operational condition. In 1933, Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad

Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad

The Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad was a railroad that operated in the Midwestern United States. Commonly referred to as the Burlington or as the Q, the Burlington Route served a large area, including extensive trackage in the states of Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri,...

rebuilt one of its baggage cars into a replica of the first RPOs that were used on the Hannibal and St. Joseph in 1862. The railroad displayed the car in several cities along the railroad; it now resides at the Patee House Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri.

External links

Great Northern Railway Post Office Car No. 42 — photographs and short history of an RPO built in 1950.
Mobile Post Office Society
TPO and Seapost Society

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.