How they used to do it

[altivo]

The heartbeat of rural mail exchange for small towns across the middle of America at least up through WWII relied upon transport by rail. First class mail traveled on passenger trains, which maintained regular schedules. Outbound mail going in the direction of a train with a postal facility on board was suspended in a mail bag from a trackside pole. A worker on board the moving train used a special hook to snatch the bag and simultaneously dumped the inbound mail bag onto the platform. This operation was carried out hundreds of times a day, often while the trains were traveling at 70 to 80 miles per hour.

This weekend the Illinois Railway Museum, a few miles down the road from our farm, celebrated the history of the Railroad Post Office. I was able to get a fairly clear video of the mail exchange operation, which I'm told actually requires that the train be moving at a fairly high speed. Too slow and gravity overcomes inertia, causing the mail bag to fall from the hook before it can be retrieved. I never post video, but I hope I've done this successfully.

Comments

[casey382]

The video works good. Sound is great, as well.

[altivo]

Thanks for letting me know. It plays back fine for me from my own disk, but I can't get it to play online at all, even though Flickr says it loaded successfully. Either a bandwidth issue or else a firewall issue, I suppose.

[casey382]

I sent the URL to my friend Rich, and he could watch it too.

[marzolan.livejournal.com]

Works fine from over here.

And I always wondered how exactly that was supposed to work...

[altivo]

I knew how it was done in theory, but had never before seen it demonstrated live. There is some skill involved in aiming the hook, apparently. It pivots on a vertical shaft and slides up and down. The mail bag is actually hourglass shaped and the idea is to grab it right at the narrow spot. The bags were opened and sorted on the train so that mail for other destinations down the line could be dropped on the same trip. I'd be tempted to run over there and watch it some more today, but I really need to get some other things done. ;p

[moonhare]

This operation was carried out hundreds of times a day...

Another 'lost art.' Thanks so much! Video and sound clear and crisp.

Brings to mind that so many of the things that are done each day, without thinking, can disappear in a generation (even stupid things like dialing a rotary phone or pulling a tab-top soda).

[altivo]

Indeed. Not that I think pulling off an aluminum tab top is a significant skill, but I've speculated before that some future archeologist is really going to wonder what those things were. Rotary phones and analog clocks are still around, but I regularly see people even in their 20s who have no idea how to use one.

I was a bit surprised by the video, actually. Of course it's a huge file for just 60 seconds, but given that it was taken by an $80 snap shot camera, I'm impressed. I goofed though and forgot that I could use the zoom telephoto to get a closer view of the action at the mail car.

[aerofox]

Nice video!
This was fun to watch, as was the rest of the museum!

Thanks for having us over to see the horses, though they were more interested in food than us ;) Tess wanted to eat me *giggle*
Maybe the next time I'm up, the mosquitoes won't be as bad.

[altivo]

We're really glad you could come by.

Tess doesn't eat foxes. If she was mouthing or licking you, that's a sure sign that she likes you, though. Sometimes when I hold her for the farrier I end up with the whole front of me wet and slobbery.

Rain is worse this afternoon here than it was yesterday morning, so it looks as if we picked the right day for the picnic. I hope we'll be doing it again next year.

[merik]

Neat! I've always wondered how that worked. My paternal grandfather's dream was to work an on-train postal facility. He was a career (over 30 years) mail carrier, but he and Grandma had to indulge their love of trains by traveling as passengers. I'd love to travel by train, too, but I'm a few decades too late for that to be really practical considering where I would want to travel to. :-P

[altivo]

Wikipedia has a nice photo of the hook snatching the bag at the IRM. Same post office car as they were using this weekend.

Even in the 1950s, many passenger routes were in fact being subsidized by the mail service. When the post office decided in 1967 to stop sending first class mail by rail and shift it to air carriers, it was the last straw for commercial passenger service on the rails. Santa Fe alone lost more than $30 million a year in income when the mail cars shut down. The railroads ended their passenger service and Amtrak took over just three years later.

[merik]

Wikipedia has a nice photo of the hook snatching the bag at the IRM. Same post office car as they were using this weekend.

That is a nice photo.

The railroads ended their passenger service and Amtrak took over just three years later.

*nods* I'd heard this in general from my grandfather years ago, as well as picking up bits and pieces of the story on my own from the various railroading magazines he used to get and I loved to read. I do wish sometimes I'd been born in the age of passenger trains, though. When Dad and his sister were kids, my grandfather-to-be would take the family on long vacations every year by train. Mount Vernon, Ohio, had stations for both the B&O and the Pennsylvania RR, so it was easy to catch a train to almost anywhere. By the time Dad graduated from high school, he'd been through all of the lower 48 states by train. That's something I wish I could do, but I know I'll never get the chance to...

[altivo]

I was an undergraduate in the last years before Amtrak, and rode Grand Trunk and Penn Central trains between Lansing and Detroit a few times. It was depressing. You could see the last shreds of what had once been a bustling enterprise.

The conductors were old guys just waiting to retire. The coaches were showing the wear and tear of years without maintenance. Worst of all, though, was the station at Durand, where we had to change trains. Durand was the meeting point of the two once great railroads, and had once been a very busy transfer point. There was a big station, with many benches in a large waiting room, and spaces that had once held restaurants and concessions now all empty and dusty. I'm not sure the station was even open at that time. I think it was just a transfer point where the two lines met. Grand Trunk went east to Port Huron and into Canada there. Penn Central went southeast to Detroit, Toledo, and Cleveland. Rail service from Lansing was provided only by Grand Trunk, hence the transfer to get to Detroit. The conductor would marshall us off the train and lead us like a line of school kids across the crumbling concrete platforms to the other train that was standing and waiting for us to connect.

After Amtrak took over, I made many trips from Chicago to Florida and back, riding the Capitol Ltd. or the Broadway Ltd. to the east coast and then switching to the Silver Meteor or the Silver Star to reach Ocala. Nearly everywhere you could see the glory that once was and had been hidden behind the dull plastic of the new Amtrak way. Philadelphia had the only station that was really busy and gave you the feeling of what might have been.

I also made one trip out to California and back on the San Francisco Zephyr. Those were the new "Super Liner" coaches that Amtrak had purchased, too tall for the eastern tunnels, too long for the curves, but they sailed through Iowa and Wyoming easily enough.

I've flown commercial airlines too, but I hate them. I will not do that again for anything. Travel by train or car or even bus gives you a chance to see where you are going and where you've been, to realize the distances involved, and understand that there are places "in between" the end points. I've seen more spectacular scenery that way than any airline traveler ever does through his tiny window or wrapped up in some cheap in-flight movie.

My advice? Take the train. There's a chance that passenger service will revive in the face of energy shortages and the rising cost of airline travel, but it's only a chance. People are too impatient now. But Amtrak is still running for the moment. Go somewhere by train. ;D

[farthing]

Interesting stuff, there's all these nice little details how something as relatively simple as mail goes around. Or used to. =)

[altivo]

Yes, I'd say it got around a lot better when it went by rail, actually. These days first class mail can be really slow and unpredictable, especially in winter. When it went by train, it was very reliable. You quickly learned how many days any given route would take, and could count on it not varying more than a day either way.