Mail by Rail - The Story of the Post Office and the Railways

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Effective August 15, 1955, the fifteen divisions of the Postal Transportation Service were eliminated and the mail routes divided among the same Postal Regions into which Post Offices were classified. b) The history of the apparatus used to exchange bags with ground staff whilst the train is travelling at speed. I was intrigued to read that a live kitten was sent in a box by mail (along with a bottle of milk with a tube through the cork) and had experienced the jolt of the exchange. Poor mite!

Going underground to avoid the jam". Rail. No.334. EMAP Apex Publications. 1–14 July 1998. pp.36–41. ISSN 0953-4563. OCLC 49953699. A pneumatic underground railway [29] was used by the Post Office in London between 1863 and 1874 using individual wheeled capsules, operated by the London Pneumatic Despatch Company. After visiting the Postal Museum in London a few years ago, I was intrigued by this system. Mail by Rail did not disappoint with the level of research and detail in this book. The Royal Mail System is amazing. The numerous photos in this book helped bring the text to life to see the ways the mail got onto a train and how it was sorted on a carriage. If you want to learn more about how mail moved around the UK from the 1800s to now, this book will give you everything you need to know. NetGalley, Deb Kiley Armstrong's successor in Chicago, George Bangs, was appointed as the second general superintendent of the postal railway service. Bangs encouraged the use of fast mail trains, trains made up entirely of mail cars, traveling on expedited schedules designed to accommodate the needs of the Post Office rather than the needs of the traveling public.If you collect train mail the book is a must, if not there is enough here to easily justify the cost simply because it is a good read with some great pictures. Highly recommended. By, Undiscovered Scotland. "Names of the Dead by Mark Leggatt: Undiscovered Scotland Book Review". www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk . Retrieved 19 December 2017. Railways have been used for the carriage of mail since soon after the Liverpool & Manchester Railway opened in 1830, the development of the first travelling post offices following, enabling the Post Office to achieve maximum efficiencies in mail transportation. As the rail network grew the mail network grew with it, reaching a peak with the dedicated mail trains that ran between London and Aberdeen. And yet, even without the TPO, mail traffic is still being carried up and down Britain’s rail network today.

In 1890, 5,800 postal railway clerks provided service over 154,800 miles (249,100km) of railroad. By 1907, over 14,000 clerks were providing service over 203,000 miles (327,000km) of railroad. When the post office began handling parcel post in 1913, Terminal Railway Post Office operations were established in major cities by the RMS to handle the large increase in mail volume. The Railway Mail Service reached its peak in the 1920s, then began a gradual decline with the discontinuance of RPO service on branchlines and secondary routes. After 1942, Highway Post Office (HPO) service was utilized to continue en route sorting after discontinuance of some railway post office operations. As highway mail transportation became more prevalent, the Railway Mail Service was redesignated as the Postal Transportation Service. Mew, G. M. (1964). "Paper 3: The Post Office Railway". Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Conference Proceedings. 179 (1964): 39–56. doi: 10.1243/PIME_CONF_1964_179_009_02. Well, the doorman had a call in at each pouch as they came in. Well he cut it short. In other words, he would say something like, "Florida dies with a two from chic seven." Royal Mail chief executive Simon Thompson is understood to want to at least treble the postal volumes transported on the railways. Bosses are halfway towards agreeing the necessary timetable changes with Network Rail that would allow it to achieve such an ambition, sources close to the company said. I heard it said that any RPO clerk that was worth his salt was good for 10,000 post offices in his distribution area. One or the other direction of his distribution, he would have to have a working knowledge of 10,000 post offices.Romanski, Fred J. "The Fast Mail, History of the Railway Mail Service", Prologue Vol. 37 No. 3, (Fall 2005), pp. 12-21. The Post Office (London) Railway played a pivotal role in the transportation of mail in London. Its continued, rarely interrupted, service is testament to the skilled engineering and maintenance teams that kept the system running. The network even had its own underground workshop beneath Mount Pleasant. Through declining use and closure of the above ground offices the system eventually became un-economical to run. In 2003 the system was suspended and today remains closed. Milner, Chris, ed. (October 2018). "Rail Mail's first year of success". The Railway Magazine. Vol.164, no.1, 411. Horncastle: Mortons Media. p.10. ISSN 0033-8923.

Finden, R.E.; Piqué, P.; Kettridge, K. (January 1984). "New Transformer/Rectifier Units for the Post Office Railway". British Telecommunications Engineering. 2 (4): 256. Narrow gauge enthusiasts may well find the standard-gauge section of this book interesting, but the Post Office Railway chapters will fascinate. Narrow Gauge World Magazine - No 170, October 2022In February 1996, RES was bought by EWS (now DB Schenker). Seven months later, on September 30 1996, the LDC opened, signalling a dramatic change for the movement of mail on the railway. Bridging the Knowledge Gap in London's 'Secret Tube' ". Cambridge Centre for Smart Infrastructure & Construction . Retrieved 16 June 2014. Poole, L.G. "The Travelling Post Offices of Victoria: 1865 - 1912." In: Australian Railway Historical Society Bulletin, June 1969. pp. 127-139. The Post Office also turned to railways when it sought a solution to the London traffic that hindered its operations in the Capital, obtaining powers to build its own narrow gauge, automatic underground railway under the streets to connect railway stations and sorting offices. Although construction and completion were delayed by the First World War, the Post Office (London) Railway was eventually brought into use and was an essential part of Post Office operations for many years.