Just picked up this issue and it brings back some fond memories. I was fortunate to see some of the last runs by the CB&Q Northerns during the Christmas rush on the Chicago / Aurora racetrack pulling extra sections of these trains. Impressive would be an understatement.[:)]
The article mentions some really fast running during the heyday of the Fastmail- 127 mph with E units and the speed recorder disabled! Assuming that’s not a fish story, those mail clerks must have had a heck of a time sorting mail at those speeds on jointed rail.
It’s a great issue !! I got to ride on the GN Badger / Gopher, and CNW and CB&Q were both local roads when I was growing up. Plus my Dad’s first job with the old US Post Office was picking up mail at the Milwaukee and Great Northern depots in downtown Minneapolis and taking it back to the main Mpls. post office. Later, we bowled with a guy who had been an RPO Clerk.
In my days as an undergraduate at MIT, when I wanted to mail anything in a hurry to parents or friends in NY, instead of springing for an air-mail stamp, I would ride my bike to South Station and hand the letter or package to the RPO clerk on the RPO car with an open door near the rear of the Federal and would be certain it would be delived to a Manhattan address the next morning. Of course the money saved was trivial, but the excuse to visit the station was a good one. Actually, it was faster than air mail, because air-mail would not be picked up until the following morning anyway.
Did anybody else on this thread regularly mail letters via an RPO car?
Yes, Dave, I did. The Alton had RPO’s on most of the runs. The mail slot was usually used so as to bother the mailmen.
My younger brother worked in Chicago and would use the Ann Rutledge to send a letter to our Mother. She would get it the same day. Twice a day delivery back in those days for a 3 cent stamp.
It only seems faster in the old days. We’re all guilty of selective memory in that regard. As was pointed out in that issue, the increased mechanization of mail handling and sorting was one of the major contributors in the demise of RPO’s and HYPO’s. In-transit sorting is less of a necessity when the mail moves by air at 500 MPH instead of by rail at 60 MPH. To be fair, we would also have to compare a modern Air Mail Facility with a past Transfer Depot to see how mail is handled from one route to the next.
At the LaSalle St. Station in Chicago there was a mail box adjacent to the gate for the 20th Century Limited. If you had a letter that HAD to be delivered in New York City the very next day you posted it by hand in this box which was pulled just prior to the Century’s departure. Your letter would be delivered the next afternoon, less than 24 hours later. Great service and all for the price of a 3 cent stamp.
I’m not a big fan of the present mail system but I must point out that while a letter could be mailed for just 3 cents back then, a cup of coffee could be bought for only slightly more, 5 cents, and with free refills in many places.
What does Barstucks charge for a cup of coffee (coffee not latte)? At 39 cents, a stamp now costs 13 times more than back then; can a cup of coffee be bought anywhere for 13 nickels - 65 cents?
“At the LaSalle St. Station in Chicago there was a mail box adjacent to the gate for the 20th Century Limited. If you had a letter that HAD to be delivered in New York City the very next day you posted it by hand in this box which was pulled just prior to the Century’s departure. Your letter would be delivered the next afternoon, less than 24 hours later. Great service and all for the price of a 3 cent stamp.”
KCSfan (quoted above) is right! And not only at LaSalle St. Station, but at Chicago Union Station as well.
At the train gates located along the south side of Chicago Union Station was a brightly polished brass mailbox with a spotlight shining on it. The “pickup times” card posted on this box stated that mail deposited here would make connection with Pennsylvania Railroad trains for the east. Shortly after 9:00-am on Columbus Day 1966 I mailed a letter there, I suspect it made connection with The Manhattan Limited, and it was delivered the next day at Princeton, NJ. Not too shabby for a nickel’s worth of postage!
Mail by Rail brought back some great memories. I can recall as a very small boy in the late 1940’s a railroader Grandfather taking a very thrilled youngster to LA Union Station to watch mail being transferred to Pacific Electric Box Motors for delivery to many points in the Los Angeles area.
It was faster in many cases in the old days. I could post a letter on an RPO for any town down the line and it would be delivered that day. Now the mail must travel 100 miles to the central sorting center so that it can come back to the main post office in this area. Then the bags for the outlying Post Offices are sorted into delivery routes and loaded into smaller trucks and sent out. Then at the final Post Office it still has to be sorted by the deliveryman so that it is in order for his route. It routinely takes three days for that to occur for a bill that comes to my house from less than half a mile away. And that company even presorts the bills when they are posted. Mechanization MAY be less expensive, but service sure has suffered.
I used to be able to post a local delivery letter in the morning mail and receive a reply in the afternoon mail on the same day! Where can I get a similar level of service today without paying for hand delivery?
You are correct that mechanization is less expensive and many folks are unaware of how much is saved. The cost of sorting 1000 letters by hand is roughly $40, those same 1000 go through the machine at a cost of just a bit over $2.00. You can imagine what it would cost to mail a letter if they keep handling everything by hand. If you really have three day delivery on local mail contact the district and I’ll bet that will change. Of course you’re going to have enough “slow letters” to show a pattern.
Comes down to money, like everything else. If we don’t want to go out and deliver our own mail we’re going to have to accept measures to make it affordable for the USPS. My local mail is trucked 200 miles round trip every night and delivered the next day.
Having spent the summer of 1970 as a second-shift substitute clerk at the main Chicago Post Office, I found that the amount of labor involved in manually sorting mail was incredible. Mechanization of sorting was relatively new at that time and the difference between what I could sort in front of my case and what one letter-sorting machine (LSM) operator could sort was an eye-opener. Also remember that postal workers in the past were quite low-paid compared to private-sector jobs and that is not the situation anymore. The Postal Service has always been a tough outfit to work for and higher pay is required to attract people to work there. Mechanization, sectional centers, etc. are necessary to keep the Postal Service afloat without raising postage rates to an obscene amount.
I am not speaking for the USPS and I’m not defending the Post Office, but I am at work right now in a Postal Facility. I am an Electronics technician responsible to keep these sorting machines running. My boss thinks that we should be doing nothing all night as that means the machines are all working good. The operators and their machines sort about 40,000 mail pieces an hour and require two passes in a machine to get the letters in the order that the letter carrier walks the route in. We also read about 95% of the addresses on a letter with computers, including my bad handwriting. Right now they are all running, and it is a holiday, but I am at work doing what I should be doing. Most facilites sort mail every day of the year, including Christmas. The price of a stamp is .39 cents, and it only took the USPS 200 years to get them that high. Gas can go up that much overnight, and you probably buy more gas in a month than you do stamps in a year. Most of us postal employees are hard working individuals, but just like any place we do have a few, very few slackers and bad people once in awhile.
The real reason I am responding is to say I work with a fellow Electronics Technician who was a RPO clerk in a relief bid. He is now in his sixties and worked out of Chichago on some route North in the 1960s. He does not remember even what railroad he worked. He went to work at the postal facility at the train station (and I think mail went out of six stations there), rode the train and sorted mail, just like any other job. Not that he forgets, he just is not into trains. I lent him my issue of Classic Trains to read and he said that did not pick up and drop off as much mail as those articles said but he worked on the RPOs in the last few years of service. He did read the magazine from cover to cover and wishes he had remembered more, but there was not much slack time in that job to watch the scenery go by. He still had to remember many schemes since he was the relief bid, an
i was very impressed by the article.i found it well researched with excellent photography ,hats off to all the people who contributed thier time and effort into doing an excellent job.100%is my rating