Postcrossing Blog

Mail can be moved in many different ways, as the newest series of Europa stamps shows… but did you know that this process was once done with the help of wagons that whizzed by in a metal tunnel, deep underneath the bustling streets of London?

We’re talking about the UK's Post Office Underground Railway, charmingly later referred to as Mail Rail, a driverless electric underground railway system used to move post between sorting offices in London. It was constructed throughout the 1910s and 1920s with combined efforts of the Post Office and the Underground Electric Railways Company of London, inspired by the Chicago Tunnel Company’s underground railway freight tunnel network.

The railway began its operations on December 3rd, 1927. It ran from east to west and stretched six and a half miles between the East End and Paddington. Consisting of eight stations, the largest existed below Mount Pleasant. At its peak, a new train of mail arrived at the station every six minutes. Employees had to work very quickly in order to remove all the mail whose destination was Mount Pleasant and load any mail destined for other offices. There was a great camaraderie between staff members, who generally spent their entire careers working on the system. You can see evidence of this from the relics left behind on walls near major mailbag chutes: a dartboard, finished paintings, and a collection of stamps.

Only three other cities attempted an underground postal railway: Munich, Germany in 1910, Lucerne, Switzerland in 1927, and Zurich, Switzerland in 1937. All closed their operations in the 80’s. The Chicago Tunnel Company sometimes delivered parcels, but its main function was not associated with the Post Office.

By 2003, only three stations of London’s Post Office Underground Railway remained. Royal Mail had reported that using Mail Rail cost five times more than using road transport for the same task, and so, after 75 years of operation, the railway shut down on May 31st, 2003. Today, the British Postal Museum and Archive (BPMA) has been undertaking efforts to conserve parts of the Mail Rail.

You can learn more about their endeavors and about the railway itself at the BPMA Museum’s Mail Rail page and fantastic Flickr gallery. If you’re in the area, they currently have a free photography exhibition about the Mail Rail that you can visit!

If you’ve ever been to the U.K., you may have seen bright red cylindrical objects around town. These pillar boxes are the U.S. equivalent of the free-standing blue arch-like mailboxes (and should not be confused with pillarboxes, which are the black bars that appear to the sides of a movie image that wasn’t formatted for widescreen). Although they’re more common in the U.K. or in former nations of the British empire, versions of this special red post box can also be found in other countries, such as Japan or Portugal.

Pillar boxes started to appear in 1852, twelve years after the first adhesive postage stamp was introduced. Before then, citizens would have to take their outgoing mail to the nearest letter receiving house or post office and personally deliver it to the postmaster after purchasing a stamp. Although they were initially proposed in 1840 by Sir Rowland Hill (who thought they would “add greatly to the public convenience”), it wasn’t until 1852 that the first pillar boxes were erected in the Channel Islands. It was a successful trial, which later spread with their implementation accross the mainland.

The boxes varied slightly from one area to the next, as each District Surveyor gave their own specifications for the design. You can find the most unique-looking ones that were made early on, when they included things like octagonal pillars, fluted columns, vertical slits instead of horizontal ones, and different coloring. The construction of pillar boxes was standardized in 1905, generally made of cast iron and in a cylindrical shape.

There are three distinct parts of a pillar box: the cap, which sits on the carcass and is bolted down from the inside, the door, which is hinged and displays the Royal Cypher of the reigning monarch, and the carcass, the main body that produced down below ground level, giving stability to the pillar box. Over 150 designs and varieties of pillar boxes, and their cousins, wall boxes (mail receptacles that are set into a walls), have emerged, though not all have survived.

Next time you’re in the UK, or any other country that sports these postal beauties, look a little closer and see if you can guess what time period it was erected (check out this page for some clues on the Royal cyphers)!

For a more in depth look into the history of these boxes, check out “Well adapted for a purpose…”, a really neat post from the British Postal Museum’s blog.

Happy pillar box spotting! :)

Some months ago, while touring an underground bunker in Berlin, I was treated to a rare sight: a mini-demonstration of Berlin’s old pneumatic dispatch system! And that got me thinking… were there other pneumatic mail delivery systems in the world? What could we find out about them? If you’re curious too, keep reading!

The story of pneumatic tubes starts with William Murdoch, a Scottish engineer, who invented them in the 19th century. Developed later by the London Pneumatic Despatch Company, these tubes used pressurised air to propel cylindrical containers throughout systems set up in certain buildings or sometimes, entire cities. During the second half of the 19th century, the pneumatic post system was implemented in post offices and telegraph offices of several large cities to quickly deliver letters and telegrams between themselves, banks, stock exchanges, and ministries. This method was found to be much more convenient and quicker than transporting letters in horse-drawn carriages or depending on human messengers.

Control Panel of Prague’s Pneumatic Post system

In 1853 the first system was built, linking the London Stock Exchange to the city’s main telegraph station; in 1861 it transported mail from the Euston railway station to the General Post Office and Holborn; in 1865 the Rohrpost was developed in Berlin, spanning 400km; in 1866 Paris created their system, a total length of 467km. Other cities like Vienna, Prague, New York City, Munich, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Hamburg, Naples, Rome, Milan, Melbourne, Marseilles, Philadelphia, Boston, St. Louis, and Chicago soon followed.

Some systems became rather complex and effective, but were eventually surpassed by more modern methods of communication and transport, and were mostly abandoned during the 20th century. The Paris network was in use until 1984, finally replaced by computers and fax machines. One lasting pneumatic post network still exists in the Czech Republic, known as the Old Lady of Czech telecommunications. Prague’s network of tubes extends 55km and was still used for delivering letters and parcels until 2002, when a flood rendered it inoperative. The current owner is gradually repairing and preserving the system, in hopes of using it as an educational experience and tourist attraction. Today, hospitals, banks, nuclear reactors, and some airports still have uses for these systems, and have updated and refined its technological ability.

Check out the blog pneumaticpost.blogspot.com to learn more interesting facts about these tubes and about the subculture of “steampunks” who cherish it so. The blog also features a many tube maps, like this one of Prague.

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.

Is this poem familiar to you? It’s part of the movie Night Mail, a 1936 documentary film about a LMS (London, Midland and Scottish) Railway mail train.

We’ve talked about the Railway Post Offices before, but on this documentary, you can actually see them in action:

Isn’t it fascinating? The on-board mail sorting, the clip mechanism to snatch the mail bags, the control room… oh! and the British countryside of the 30s!

The poem, which is recited at the end of the documentary is by W. H. Auden. Wikipedia provides some insight about it:

As recited in the film, the poem’s rhythm imitates the train’s wheels as they clatter over track sections, beginning slowly but picking up speed so that by the time the penultimate verse the narrator is at a breathless pace. As the train slows toward its destination the final verse is more sedate.

I hope you enjoyed that glimpse of life on a Railway train!

As for the results of last week’s giveaway, the eight lucky winners are: ladybug513, anitag71, kirimon, lovpinka, leoloco, journeyy, gwyllion and lars. Congratulations!

Most people know the name of Charles Lindbergh. He was a great American aviator, most famous for being the first pilot to complete a solo non-stop transatlantic flight, from New York to Paris, in May 1927.

But did you know that before his transatlantic adventures, Mr. Lindbergh was also a U.S. Air Mail pioneer (and later one of its advocates)?

As a child, Charles Lindbergh had always been interested in the mechanics of cars and motorbikes, and so it came as no surprise that when the time came, he chose to enrol in University as a mechanical engineering student. A couple of years later though, he found his true passion for aeronautics, dropped out and re-enrolled in a flying school in Nebraska. He spent a few years studying, doing air tricks & acrobatics across the country, testing planes and finally training with the American Army Air Service. At 23, he was a already veteran flier, but since the army didn’t need pilots at the time, he was looking for a job elsewhere…

Meanwhile, the US government had been running some experimental air mail routes between different cities for almost 8 years. The results were good, but the government had no intentions of continuing expanding the Air Mail Service on its own… and so in 1925, the Kelly Air Mail Act was passed by congress, which allowed the private sector to bid on specific airmail feeder routes to the main transcontinental system.

And thus in October that year Charles Lindbergh was hired by the Robertson Aircraft Corporation to be the chief pilot on a Contract Air Mail route between St. Louis and Chicago, with 2 stops in Springfield and Peoria.
He started flying a modified war surplus de Havilland DH-4 biplane after swearing the Oath of Mail Messengers, which had to be changed to note him as a pilot instead of a mail messenger – you can see it here.

Lindbergh did well as an airmail pilot, achieving a remarkable 99% delivery efficiency even in the harsh conditions of the time (which included no proper equipment or landing facilities).

Twice during his work he lost control of the plane due to bad weather or faulty equipment and had to jump out of it, landing by parachute on nearby fields. On both occasions, his first priority upon landing was to locate the wreckage of the planes and secure the mail – like a good mail carrier would!

He continued to be a chief pilot on this Air Mail route until February 1927, when he decided to take part on the race for the first non-stop flight from New York to Paris… Well, we all know how he did on that adventure! :)

And although Charles Lindbergh never returned to the Air Mail career after winning the Orteig Prize, he kept on promoting the Air Mail services, by doing speeches on their behalf and carrying souvenir mail covers from international flights in his plane, the Spirit of St. Louis.

Credits: All photos by the San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives collection on Flickr. Read more about Charles Lindbergh on his wikipedia page and on charleslindbergh.com.