Ok. So the Post Office is broke, is going to cut back services causing first class mail not be delivered overnight by closing a great numbers of sorting centers nationwide, eliminating jobs and services, depleteing the PO’s already weakening service base.
Ok…So Amtrak is asking early retirement of employees with the result some feel undermines safety and of course, further make service more shakey than ever.
Before basically 1958, trains moved the mail which was sorted enroute and gave better overnight service for first class mail than any zip service did. Mail was reliable, rail service was reliable. Do you see where I wanna go with this…?..
Correct ! The Post Office is broke ( or heading there rapidly.)
AMTRAK has got all kinds of issues. Not only personnel, but equipment and financing ( monies dispensed at the whim of Congress, and individual members).
The national passenger movement by rail is almost illusionary. It is almost a system conceived by a Louis Carrol. Trains that make meet scheduled in the middle of the night. (But only if they arrive on time.) In some cases long layovers. Railroad stations that in many cases barely have ‘comfort facilities’, but only if open for brief periods to match a schedule that may be a joke.( See Amtrak vs. Union Pacific).
henry6 quote: “…Before basically 1958, trains moved the mail which was sorted enroute and gave better overnight service for first class mail than any zip service did. Mail was reliable, rail service was reliable. Do you see where I wanna go with this…?..”
Correct again; But the reason the USPS gave up the Rail Post Offices was the host railroads, and the fact that the costs were going up and the Post Office was moving the sorting off trains and in some cases onto highway Post Offices. The last RPO was the NYC to Washington,D.C. which made its last run on 1 July 1977. The end started in late 1950’s and continued through the 1960’s.
Railway Post Offices would be a boon IMHO to the AMTRAK Operation, but will not work until the enroute schedule delays can be resolved with the host railroads. The rents on the routes generated by RPOs would certainly make it worthwhile for the host roads and AMTRAK to come to a scheduling agreement.
Of course you couldn’t see where I was going…nor could a whole bunch of people…because you’re all too young! A fact I overlooked! Into the early 60’s the US mail was sorted enroute in an efficient system aboard railroad cars called Railway Post Office’s. Similarly there were highway buses or vans called Highway Post Offices and the same efficient service provided aboard lake and river boats across the country. The US Post Office introduced zip codes and electronic reading of envelopes in sorting centers where mail was trucked into and out of in hte early 60’s which negated it’s need for passenger trains which carried mail cars sorting mail enroute.
What I am aiming at that mail sorting aboard trains enroute would eliminate postal sorting centers, trucking mail long distances back and forth (to mail a letter to across the street now means the letter will be taken 50 to 100 miles to a sorting center, sorted, returned that 50 to 100 miles instead of being sorted right there in town, to be taken across the street). Trains could be operated for mail and passenger service with the two agencies sharing expenses of the train, people would be employed providing a service and be productive in mail handling, mail would be moved and sorted efficeintly ane inexpesively, and people would have trains to ride. And with the concept of zip codes and electronic readers, the systgem would be quicker and more efficient and less labor intensive than it was 50, 60 years ago!
The railroads did not take trains off so that the Post Office couldn’t operate but the Post OFfice discontinued RPO routes which led to the discontinuance of trains. Your other remarks are based on the status quo of both Amtrak and the USPS today and does not take into consideration that such a plan of reinstituing RPO services would mean that a system and plan would be designed with the aim of making it work. And maybe only the sorting enroute may happen and a lot of the RPO services we remember will not be part of the new plan. Lets use the past as a source of ideas to build on for the future rather than thinking in terms of using the past as it was.
I, for one, couldn’t agree with you more – “new” and “progress” aren’t necessarily better. But I fear that few people have the imagination and breadth of vision to see how to adapt the best of the “old” to new circumstances. Most seem to get so stuck in only seeing how the ideas of the past were executed in the past, that they can’t see the potential for (re)application to the present, and to the future.
We need to be able to think differently than we have up to now. To quote someone more insightful than I …
“The world we have created today, as a result of our thinking thus far, has problems which cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them.”– Albert Einstein
As Lucius Beebe used to say when people objected to his wish to turn the calendar back XX years to get back the steam locomotives and luxury passenger trains of those days:
Unfortunately, Amtrak doesn’t serve 1/1000th of the number of towns that RPO’s used to stop at “in the good old days” when every railroad ran passenger trains.
Amtrak uses only two routes through Arizona – the BNSF transcon through Flagstaff and the Union Pacific Sunset Route through Tucson, and the Sunset Limited runs only three or four days a week and is hardly ever on time. Sometimes it is so late that they turn around in Tucson and bus passengers between there and California.
Amtrak could never be relied upon for dependable mail delivery anywhere except the Northeast Corridor.
BALT…it’s because the United States Post Office (not the United States Postal Service) used to be profitable or at least always break even…
…And Cacole, you miss the point that Amtrak and the USPS would redesign and rebuild a system to do the job. I am not saying piecemeal together, laying one service over the other, but rather design a service which moves people while moving and sorting mail enroute. NOT going back to the old days of choo choos and RPO’s but using new technologies built up from the old systems. The past should be a motel room for the night and not a new full time residence.
All we have to do is just privatize mail delivery and somebody like UPS will pick it up and make a profit, and whatever service quality the public wants, the public will get. It is really a no-brainer, but the U.S. Post Office will never be dismantled or allow private competition. Instead, they will keep their wage and benefit overhead high and cut performance to try to try to show the public that they can’t do the job for the money they get.
The way Congress will probably solve the post office problem is to put a tax on email.
Amtrak LD trains did move some mail, at least into the early 80s. It moved in airline mail containers in baggage cars. I can remember some being loaded/unloaded in Greensboro NC from the Crescent circa 1980.
The problem with the USPS is that they haven’t adjusted with the times fast enough. Their mandate is to deliver first class mail. Over the past couple of decades, most of the need for speed first class mail has vanished. The really speedy stuff goes via USPS or private overnight air service. The personal stuff is pretty much email and Facebook, et. al. Bills, checks and account statements arrive via email or bill paying services on the internet.
Most of what comes in my mailbox is magazines, junk mail and sale flyers.
We really don’t need 6 day a week delivery for all this. Once a week would be fine. The post office should have cut mail delivery down to 3 days a week long ago. One mail carrier could then cover two routes. One MWF and one TuThSa.
Of course, the bulk mailers might complain. They want their sale flyers in you mailbox on the day before the sale starts and the USPS works diligently to make this happen. Problem is, that’s not part of the USPS mandate. If it all went away, the maketeers would just have to find other channels to hawk their wares.
I don’t think anyone would have noticed if the USPS had just quietly made the change and let mail slip one day back. Do people really think that their mail gets there in a day? It was news to me that it did.
They could go to 3 day a week delivery and I would be fine with that as long as I could get to a PO on a Saturday to pick up whatever they can’t leave.
As for taxing email, they may be too late for that. There are all kinds of ways to send messages now. My email is now more flyers and advertising than the regular mail.
While I can understand the sentiment behind your thoughts, the reality of the situation would be a killer.
For example, you want to “redesign and rebuild a system to do the job”. I live in South Dakota. The nearest Amtrak station is 200 miles away from me, at Omaha, NE, St. Cloud MN or Fargo, ND. Building any system to get that mail to me would require the building or comandeering of 200 miles of railroad tracks. Just a guess here- 200 miles times $2(?) million per mile(?)= $400 million to get me postal service via Amtrak.
Granted, there is a somewhat direct line from here to St. Cloud, MN. Trouble is, BNSF is using that line- because it’s theirs. Using the BNSF line might require some payment. How much payment would surely would depend on traffic density and fair market pricing.
A couple other factors to consider: The modern electronic sorting machines take up a whole lot more space than a dozen guys poking envelopes into pigeonholes. Also the volume of mail has to be way up from 1950. And, lastly, as part of Amtrak’s start-up, I believe part of the deal was that Amtrak is prohibited from hauling freight.
In short, it could be done. It would cost a gazillion dollars to get Amtrak/USPS service j
It seems to me that is what is causing the problem. That kind of thinking is exacly how the post office would look at it, i.e. raise the rates to cover the expense. The way to solve the problem is to cut the expense to match what the customer is willing to pay.
This would be a wonderful opportunity to get rid of the U.S. Postal Service and let the marketplace provide the service that is needed.
Zugs - the solution might make the locomotive cab a tad cramped…RRB mail in the baggage cars certainly got around the railroad I worked on faster that the US Mule and the contract carriers.
(We have to snicker here about the whining about the loss of first class next day service - hasn’t been seen in CO for decades[:-,])
Maybe, we’re on the same wave length, but not the same channel?
I’m saying raise the rates, and cut the costs. Because this is a captive type situation, we have no idea what the going rate should be to mail a letter. What a majority would probably agree on, is that junk mail should be priced the same as first class. If it takes 44 cents for the USPS to deliver a letter from me to you, why does the junk mailer pay less, to send you a catalog?
In the same sense, I’d bet a super-majority would agree that there is no reason for Senator Bob Forehead to fill my mailbox with self-promoting crap near every election without paying a penny.&n