Railway post office

In Canada and the United States, a railway post office, commonly abbreviated as RPO, was a railroad car that was normally operated in passenger service and used specifically for staff to sort mail en route, in order to speed delivery.

From the middle of the 19th century, many American railroads earned substantial revenues through contracts with the U.S. Post Office Department (USPOD) to carry mail aboard high-speed passenger trains.

Other sources state that the first official contract to regularly carry mail on a train was made with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in either 1834 or 1835.

[3] The railway post office was introduced in the United States on July 28, 1862, using converted baggage cars on the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad (which also delivered the first letter to the Pony Express).

They were used by staff to separate mail for connection with a westbound stagecoach departing soon after the train's arrival at St. Joseph.

[4] The first permanent Railway Post Office route was established on August 28, 1864, between Chicago, Illinois, and Clinton, Iowa.

[7] RPO car interiors, which at first consisted of solid wood furniture and fixtures, were soon redesigned to support their new purpose.

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.

[9] 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.

First class mail, magazines and newspapers were all sorted, cancelled when necessary, and dispatched to post offices in towns along the route.

[12] 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.

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

From 1900 to 1906 some 70 workers were killed in train wrecks while on duty in the RPOs, leading to demands for stronger steel cars.

[16] The 800,000-lb buffer load and end post requirements were later adopted by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) for all passenger MU locomotives as of April 1, 1956.

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.

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.

The last interurban RPO service was operated by Pacific Electric Railway on its route between Los Angeles and San Bernardino, California.

[citation needed] Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton, PA has RPO car #1100, Louisville & Nashville, on display.