After wasting all of November, I am finally getting back into model railroading which for me has always been a cold weather hobby. Yesterday I was at my LHS and I saw some olive drab mailboxes by JL Innovations which I purchased. I was surprised to see they were labeled pre-1955. I am old enough to remember the switch from the olive drab to red, white, and blue mailboxes but my memory is it was done later in the late 1950s. My railroad is set in 1956 and until now I have painted all my mailboxes olive drab. I did some research and found the order to change colors was made on the Fourth of July in 1955. My question is how long it took the Post Office to repaint/replace the olive mailboxes. Would there still have been some olive drab mailboxes in 1956 or would the change over have been completed by then. Would it be appropriate to have the olive mailboxes in some towns and the red, white, and blue in the others. Also, my recollection is the new boxes were blue with red tops. The only white I remember would be the lettering. Is that memory correct?
One more question. I know that the Post Office had olive drab drop boxes for the mail carriers. Were those converted from the regular mail boxes or were they original equipment.
The drop boxes were the same shape as the large mailboxes, but they had a full front door that opened so the delivery truck driver could leave mail for the mailman who walked the neighborhood route. There was one about a block from my house when I was young
The storage box on the corner in front of our house was still OD when I left home in 1966. Just like the railroads painting their equipment, there were so many boxes out there, there may still be some green ones somewhere.
One interesting factoid in that article is that olive drab was chosen because the government had such a huge surplus of olive drab paint following WWI.
What I remember is this, and for all practical purposes my memories for this sort of thing start around 1960. There were plenty of olive drab “drop boxes” on the routes near our house, although not on our street itself. As I recall they were not lettered or marked. There may have been stamped-in raised lettering. Most mail carriers lugged their own huge leather mailbags although on streets with sidewalks (we had none) some pushed 3 wheel carts that held that bag. That is when those drop boxes were really needed. I think it was well into the late 1960s before the mailman had a truck. Even then he’d park it and walk a few blocks rather than stop and start because our mail and that of our neighbors was delivered through a slot in the front door not a street side mailbox.
I do recall that most of the nearby red white and blue “mail boxes” were not the rounded top affairs that looked like the drop boxes, but smaller boxes (not bigger than a breadbox) usually affixed to a utility pole. perhaps cast iron? They had raised letters, maybe cast in. Only at busy corners and in front of our post office itself were the mail boxes new, rounded top and red, white and blue.
One practical difference is that the old smaller boxes had openings large enough to post a normal letter, or card, or postcard. The rounded top boxes had the hinged door and you could actually drop in a small package or padded envelope.
Why are some posters talking about USPS street storage boxes as being a thing of the past, when they are alive and well on Long Island - witness this USPS storage box in Malverne (Street View) which I pass periodically thru-out the year (as of two months ago it was still there) and have seen it being used. Looks a faded olive drab to me. But wait, follow that street view of Cornwell Ave. south and a few blocks away you will find another storage box (on the corner so you can manuever the view and see the storage door from the side street) as linked here. Better yet, rotate the image around to the SW corner of that intersection (Walker and Cornwell) in this Oct 2017 view and you will see a USPS mail push cart at the corner. But wait again - a few more blocks south and there’s yet another USPS storage box on Cornwell. We won’t even mention this storage box oddity just a few blocks north of the previous one, painted what to me looks to be a faded blue (note: the red box on a greenish-blue pole behind it is a take-a-book-leave-a-book “Little Free Library”).
So apparently this otherwise unremarkable several block section of a secondary street 6 or so miles from my house is indeed the true postal street storage nexus for Southern Long Island…
One interesting factoid in that article is that olive drab was chosen because the government had such a huge surplus of olive drab paint following WWI.
What I remember is this, and for all practical purposes my memories for this sort of thing start around 1960. There were plenty of olive drab “drop boxes” on the routes near our house, although not on our street itself. As I recall they were not lettered or marked. There may have been stamped-in raised lettering. Most mail carriers lugged their own huge leather mailbags although on streets with sidewalks (we had none) some pushed 3 wheel carts that held that bag. That is when those drop boxes were really needed. I think it was well into the late 1960s before the mailman had a truck. Even then he’d park it and walk a few blocks rather than stop and start because our mail and that of our neighbors was delivered through a slot in the front door not a street side mailbox.
I do recall that most of the nearby red white and blue “mail boxes” were not the rounded top affairs that looked like the drop boxes, but smaller boxes (not bigger than a breadbox) usually affixed to a utility pole. perhaps cast iron? They had raised letters, maybe cast in. Only at busy corners and in front of our post office itself were the mail boxes new, rounded top and red, white and blue.
One practical difference is that the old smaller boxes had openings large enough to post a normal letter, or card, or postcard. The rounded top boxes had the hinged door and you could actually drop in a small package or padded enve
My understanding (from my father, who was a letter carrier in Minneapolis) is that part of the reason regular Post Office mailboxes were repainted red-white-blue was to differentiate them from drop boxes, which continued to be (and I believe are) painted green.