UP RPO #5908
This Union Pacific RPO car is 85 feet long and weighs over 122,000 pounds. There were only nine of these cars made for the Union Pacific in 1963.
The car ran from Chicago, IL to Salt Lake City, UT. Crews would change in Council Bluffs and in Cheyenne, WY. It was in use until 1967, and was one of the last cars made for the Railway Post Office use.
The RPO was staffed by highly trained Railway Mail Service postal clerks, and was off- limits to the passengers on the train.
From the middle of the 19th century, many American railroads earned substantial revenues through contracts with the U.S. Post Office Department (USPOD) to carry mail aboard high-speed passenger trains; and the Railway Mail Service enforced various standardized designs on RPOs. In fact, a number of companies maintained passenger routes where the financial losses from moving people were more than offset by transporting the mail.
History
The Railway Post Office (RPO) was introduced in the United States on July 28, 1862, using converted baggage cars on the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad (which also delivered the first letter to the Pony Express). Purpose-built RPO cars entered service on this line a few weeks after the service was initiated. Their purpose was to separate mail for connection with a westbound stagecoach departing soon after the train's arrival at St. Joseph. This service lasted approximately one year.
The first permanent Railway Post Office route was established on August 28, 1864, between Chicago, Illinois, and Clinton, Iowa. This service is distinguished from the 1862 operation because mail was sorted to and received from each post office along the route, as well as major post offices beyond the route's end-points. ... George B. Armstrong, assistant postmaster at Chicago, originally came up with the idea of having mail processed and distributed while the mail was on board, en route in mail cars.
By the 1880s, railway post office routes were operating on the vast majority of passenger trains in the United States. A complex network of interconnected routes allowed mail to be transported and delivered in a remarkably short time.
As many as a dozen clerks might work in a single RPO car, although fewer would be required if part of the car was used for transport of previously sorted mail or (often in a separate compartment) express and baggage. Railway mail clerks were subjected to stringent training and ongoing testing of details regarding their handling of the mail.
On a given RPO route, each clerk was expected to know not only the post offices and rail junctions along the route, but also specific local delivery details within each of the larger cities served by the route. Periodic testing demanded both accuracy and speed in sorting mail, and a clerk scoring only 96% accuracy would likely receive a warning from the Railway Mail Service division superintendent.
An interesting feature of most RPO cars was a hook that could be used to snatch a leather or canvas pouch (“catcher pouch”) of outgoing mail hanging on a track-side mail crane (or mail hook) at smaller towns where the train did not stop.
Mail on-the-fly” technique
When the mail clerk of the RPO car grabbed the catcher pouch on the mail crane he would at the same time kick out the outgoing mail for delivery to that village. The idea behind the catcher pouch was that there could be an exchange of mail to villages too small to justify the train stopping. The complete transfer technique (tossing out the outgoing mail a second before grabbing the catcher pouch) required much skill and potentially could cause harm or even death for those not trained properly. Another reason why the catcher pouch and mail crane were developed is so the train did not have to slow down just for the exchange of mail.
The mail on-the-fly was not a smooth operating technique. One problem with the technique was that the postal clerk had to pay close attention when he raised the train's catcher arm. If it was raised too early there was a chance of hitting and destroying switch targets, telegraph poles, and railway semaphore signals, as well as the train's mail catcher arm. If the clerk was too late in raising the train's catcher arm, he might miss the catcher pouch altogether.
(Page created by HSPC member Mark Chavez)