Mail coach

To avoid a steep fine turnpike gates had to be open by the time the mail coach with its right of free passage passed through.

Mail coaches were slowly phased out during the 1840s and 1850s in Britain and by the 1880s and 1890s in Australia, their role eventually replaced by trains as the railway network expanded.

He met resistance from officials who believed that the existing system could not be improved, but eventually the Chancellor of the Exchequer, William Pitt, allowed him to carry out an experimental run between Bristol and London.

By the end of 1785 there were services from London to Norwich, Liverpool, Leeds, Dover, Portsmouth, Poole, Exeter, Gloucester, Worcester, Holyhead and Carlisle.

A service to Edinburgh was added the next year and Palmer was rewarded by being made Surveyor and Comptroller General of the Post Office.

There was strong competition for the contracts as they provided a fixed regular income on top of which the companies could charge fares for the passengers.

[2] The guard was heavily armed with a blunderbuss and two pistols and dressed in the Post Office livery of maroon and gold.

[5] By the mid-19th century, most of the mail coaches in Ireland were eventually out-competed by Charles Bianconi's country-wide network of open carriages, before this system in turn succumbed to the railways.

[8] In 1863 contracts were awarded to the coaching company Cobb & Co to transport Royal Mail services within New South Wales and Victoria.

The lucrative mail contracts helped Cobb & Co grow and become an efficient and vast network of coach services in eastern Australia.

[citation needed] Royal Mail coach services reached their peak in the later decades of the 19th century, operating over thousands of miles of eastern Australia.

[citation needed] In Western Australia, the mail coach from Albany to Perth remained an important route[9] until the Great Southern Railway opened up in 1889.

This design was a 'thorough-brace' or 'jack' style coach characterised by an elegant curved lightweight body suspended on two large leather straps, which helped to isolate the passengers and driver from the jolts and bumps of the rough unmade country roads.