RPO stood for Railway Post Office.
Watching tonight’s Super Bowl I came to realize it now stands for Run/Pass Option.
Remember when Lee Iococca changed the meaning of “cab forward”?
I do remember Lee Iacoca but not sure about the reference to cab forward.
I was too young to remember Railway Post Offices; I have read they were basically dead after the USPS canceled most of the contracts in 1967, which explains why I don’t remember them.
It was after he turned Chrysler around with the K-cars and all, and went to the first advanced designs with shorter hoods and longer passenger compartments. For marketing reasons you don’t want to say your product has a ‘shorter hood’ (which at the time had connotations of ‘less power’, something that Iacocca had a hand in promoting when he designed the Mustang a couple of decades earlier but I digress) so the idea was to come up with a reason for the now-slipperier shape.
To my knowledge (and now I wish I’d asked the question all the times I had the chance) there was no hard connection at all between ‘cab-forward’ in steam-locomotive design and ‘cab-forward’ as a Chrysler design trope. Here is what Gale had to say about the LH design:
https://www.allpar.com/corporate/cab-forward.html
which probably uses ‘cab’ as a contraction of ‘cabin’ in the automotive sense.
AT work we use “NKP” for New Key Production. More than once I have said “Nickel Plate” while reading a Power Point slide!
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-Kevin
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I remember distinctly reading in a railroad book or magazine, as a child in the very early 1960s, that American railroading would consolidate into just ‘four big systems’. Then I looked at another book’s endpapers, which had all the logos of all those Class Is, and couldn’t imagine a world in which all of them were gone.
Now I can’t really imagine or remember what it was like with them all present and active on their own…
As RPO’s were phased out or the Rutland stopped passenger operations (they occurred about the same time), there were HPO Highway Post Office) busses functioning like RPO, with sorting on board. They were red, white and blue, we used to see them when we traveled to my grandparets on weekends. Don’t know how widespread they were around the country. I think there were two here in VT.
Have fun,
Richard
That was an amazing prediction and right on the money. Two in the east and two in the west with smaller systems filling in the gaps. I wonder what was in the tea leaves that led to that assessment. If that was in the early 1960s that would have predated the Penn Central merger although I think the talks were already in the works. I think the Erie-Lackawanna had already been formed. How different would the landscape be had the proposed Southern Pacific/Santa Fe merger been allowed to proceed.
Used to describe the concept where the windshield was swept back more and the cab moved closer to the front wheel well on Chrylsers Cloud Cars. Hence, moving the car CABin forward.