Relay box

A postal relay box (American English) or pouch box (British English)[1] is a piece of postal infrastructure that may be used to provide deliverable mail to walking (or cycling) mail carriers whose routes do not take them past a post office or sorting facility.

In postal systems where walking mail carriers do not have a vehicle to store undelivered items of post, the amount of mail to be delivered may be too big or heavy to carry in a bag, necessitating the use of a relay box.

To allow convenient and secure access to pre-sorted bundles of yet to be delivered mail, a locked relay box may be used to temporarily cache items along a delivery route.

It is replenished by staff using a vehicle, and is later accessed by a postal worker carrying out a walking route.

The practice of using relay boxes has stopped or declined as volumes of mail have been decreasing.