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

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Pelling, Andrew (April 2003). "The Future of Mail Rail: A Report by the London Assembly's Public Services Committee" (PDF). Greater London Authority. ISBN 1-85261-469-2– via www.london.gov.uk. During 1845, the Midland Railway decided to extend their TPO services via Derby to Newcastle upon Tyne; and soon after reached Scotland. [5] The first special postal train was operated by the Great Western Railway between London and Bristol; the inaugural train ran on 1 February 1855, leaving Paddington station at 20:46, and arriving at Bristol at 00:30. [ citation needed] f) The final two chapters deal with the Post Office’s underground railway, first mooted in the 1860s but not fully opened until 1928. It linked the main stations and sorting offices in London, using driverless trains. This was closed in 2003 but a section was re-opened for visitors to the Postal Museum in 2017. 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. Capable of sorting more than 600,000 parcels-a-day, the 344,000 square foot plant will use robots to sort parcels before they are delivered across the North-West of England.

A new centralised computer-controlled system was introduced in 1993, enabling the entire railway to be controlled from a single point instead of through separate control rooms at each station. By the late 1990s trains were only stopping at Paddington, Western Delivery Office, Mount Pleasant, and the East District Office. More than six million bags of mail were carried below ground each year – that is four million letters every day. But laden mail trolleys have not clattered their way along station platforms for ten years now. The Travelling Post Office (TPO) last ran on January 9 2004, and is now a distant memory.Lasting approximately 15 minutes, the Mail Rail at the Postal Museum is a fun and informative way of bringing the history of the postal service to life. In 1835 Postmaster General Amos Kendall predicted, “The multiplication of rail-roads will form a new era in the mail establishment. They must soon become the means by which the mails will be transported on most of the great lines of intercommunication.”

Great Central Steam Railway - where the Travelling Post Office and Mail Exchange on the Move is recreated a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y Foster, Stefanie (5 February 2014). "Mail by rail - still". railmagazine.com. With the completion of the transcontinental link, it was possible — for the first time — to travel between the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts on a nearly continuous rail line. Not only did the new railroad facilitate the transportation of people and goods, it also allowed the mail to travel with unprecedented speed and ease. The book comprises several sections, all beautifully illustrated with photos, diagrams and etchings from old newspapers:This article is about the British and Irish mail train. For the equivalent term in North America, see railway post office. For the Queensland equivalent, see Travelling Post Office, Queensland. Berg, I. W. S. (October 1981). "The Post Office Railway". The Post Office Electrical Engineers' Journal. 74 (3): 280–281 . Retrieved 27 February 2021. In 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. During the 1980s, BR planners endeavoured to rejuvenate numerous aspects of its operations and to better fulfil customer demands. [1] Under the policy of Sectorisation, the TPOS and all rail mail operations were consolidated into their own business unit, Rail Express Systems (RES). This reorganisation under its own management team led to a new focus of its operations on the specific needs of its primary customer, the Royal Mail (RM). [1] The book is recommended to anyone who collects items of postal history that were carried and sorted by rail.

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.In October 2013, the British Postal Museum & Archive announced that it intended opening part of the network to the public. [18] [19] After approval was granted by Islington Council, work on the new museum and the railway began in 2014. [20] Special tourist trains were installed in late 2016. It was planned to open a circular route, running beneath the depot at Mount Pleasant with a journey time of around 15 minutes, by mid-2017. [21] [22] [23] The museum opened on 5 September. [24] 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. Finden, R.E.; Piqué, P.; Kettridge, K. (January 1984). "New Transformer/Rectifier Units for the Post Office Railway". British Telecommunications Engineering. 2 (4): 256. Abandonment of routes accelerated in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and many of the remaining lines were discontinued in 1967. On June 30, 1974, the Cleveland and Cincinnati highway post office, the last HPO route, was discontinued. The last railway post office operated between New York and Washington, D.C., on June 30, 1977. Tunell, George G. "The Charge for Railway Mail Carriage." Journal of Political Economy 7.2 (1899): 145-160. online

In 1958, Coras Iompair Eireann built four modern TPOs for Department of Posts and Telegraphs at their Inchicore Works. Some time before their withdrawal it had been decided that two would be dedicated to use on the Cork Mail and two to the Galway Mail, both of which originated from Connolly station in Dublin. [16] The movement of post by rail in Ireland ended in 1994 with the last day mails on 14 January and the final operational night mails on 17 January on both the Cork and Galway routes. [15] [16] White, James E. A Life Span and Reminiscences of Railway Mail Service (Deemer & Jaisohn, 1910) online. Over the next six years, construction progressed and the distance between the ends of the two railroads grew shorter. The Post Office Department contracted with Wells, Fargo & Co. “for the transportation of the United States mails between the western terminus of the Union Pacific railroad and the eastern terminus of the Central Pacific … until the two railroads should meet.” [1]

Throughout the ride, the train stops to show large projections on abandoned platforms, narrating the Mail Rail’s history through the ages. By 1914, there were 126 TPO carriages in operation throughout the United Kingdom. [1] They were only referred to as TPOs for the first time in 1928, prior to this, the common term for mail carriages had been Railway Post Offices (RPOs). [7]