Today is the 150th anniversary of the Railway Mail Service. In the midst of the Civil War, the Post Office Department established the new service. It revolutionized the way mail was processed by sorting mail aboard moving trains, not just in post offices. Trains had been carrying mail for almost 30 years by that time. Under that system, mail bags were loaded onto the trains to be carried to another post office for processing. A successful, if short-lived attempt to sort mail on moving mail cars had operated in 1862 on the Hannibal and St. Joseph (Missouri) line. George B. Armstrong, the assistant postmaster in Chicago, championed the idea and on August 28, 1864, the first such mail car (a renovated baggage car) was used on the Chicago & North Western Railroad line between Chicago and Clinton, Iowa. Newly established mail cars soon carried mail between New York and Washington, New York and Erie, Pennsylvania. Chicago routes were expanded to Chicago and Burlington, Illinois and Chicago and Rock Island, Illinois. Two clerks on average were assigned to each train car, and postal officials were soon boasting of 12 to 24 hours reduction in time of delivery. Just three years later there were 18 such routes in operation in the U.S., traveling over 4,435 miles of railroad track with 160 clerks at work processing the mail. The next year 26 railway lines were in operation, with 297 clerks at work on the trains. The trend continued over the next decades, as moving more and more of mail processing onto trains brought a decentralization of postal operations. After WWII, airlines and highways improved, taking passengers away from railroads. Declining passenger traffic brought a drop in railroad traffic. At the same time, postal officials were putting more emphasis on mechanical processing techniques, machines that needed large factory-sized buildings for operations, not tight, moving, train cars. The final railway mail car run was made on June 30, 1977, as the train from New York pulled into Washington’s Union Station.
Posted on: Thu, 28 Aug 2014 13:44:31 +0000
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