Hello, I have two R.P.O. cars that I have been thinking about adding mail hook detail parts to. I understand the way the system works on picking up mail on the fly but have a question. Were the hooks permanitly mounted to the car or could they be turned around to pick up mail from both directions of travel, or was the whole R.P.O. car turned so the hooks always faced the direction of travel ?. From the demo. videos I have seen it shows the train going thru the station picking up mail forwards then backing thru picking up mail, but does not show anyone changing the direction of the hook or how it was done.
The mail catcher was simply slid into permanently-installed brackets on the two sides of the personnel door. To remove it, the mail clerk pushed it toward the open end until the stub at the closed end came out of the bracket. Then it would simply be pulled inside the door line and moved away from the closed end until the open end slid out of its bracket. The catcher could be installed in either direction, or moved to the opposite side. Usually there was only one catcher in place at any given time.
A mail bag to be picked up would be cinched tight in the middle, creating a narrow `waist’ for the catcher to grab. The bag dropped off didn’t need that feature.
for some sick reason i always liked the story about the guy who leaned out of the engine, missed the orders but got the mail sack instead. dislocated his shoulder.
Thanks- I thought that might be the way it was done from an old slightly out of focus still picture. But you know what they say when you a**ume something. Again, Thanks for the clarification.
Bit off topic, but I remember my Dad telling the story about when he was a teenager visiting his cousins in a small town in Wisconsin. A new train was being introduced, and they went down to the tracks where his cousin’s family owned a lumber yard that was right off the tracks. He was sitting on their loading dock when the new train (my best educated guess is it was the CNW’s “Minnesota 400” in the summer of 1936) came into view, and he knew immediately it wasn’t going to stop. Apparently they had made so many stops that they decided to just keep going until they hit Madison.
As my Dad said, the engineer did ‘slow down a bit’ to about 60 MPH or so but still that was fast enough that the mailbag they were trying to pick up exploded, and the sheet music from the school band and newspapers sitting by the station etc. all went up in a whirlwind. He said it was quite a sight!!