Short history of the railway post office
Mice credited for initiation of railway postal service
Smithonian Institution railway post office exhibit
Return to Walter E.(Ed) McClelland Page
For seven months in 1960 I worked as a postal clerk in the Oakland California Postal Distribution Center. The last four months of that time I was a substitute postal clerk on the railway post office (RPO). In order to get a job in the railway postal service, applicants had to prove they could remember how to distribute mail for 1500 post offices in California. Mercifully, they broke it down into two increments - 750 northern half of the state and 750 southern half. We had 750 cards with the name of a post office on one side and the postal distribution center for that post office on the other side. It was sheer memorization, using any memory trick you could find to remember them all. The point of it all was that when you were sorting mail on a train, it had to be done quickly. And you had to know which mail sack or pigeon hole to throw it in. We also had to remember the other states distributions points; i.e. which distribution center would get mail for different states or areas of the country. Having passed the test, I became a railway postal worker.
The regulars worked the same runs all the time so they were very familiar with the distribution of mail on their run. They would work a train north, south or east out of Okland to, e.g. Reno, Bakersfield, Klamath Falls, stay overnight in a hotel where the railroaders stayed, then work a train back to Oakland the next day. Then they would have three days off. The runs were anywhere from eight to fifteen hours.
The substitutes could earn considerably more money than the regulars on the RPO's because they didn't have regular schedules. Frequently a substitute could get back from a run at 8:00 AM and get a call at noon asking if he was available for another run leaving at 7:00 PM that evening. This also meant, however, that the subs really had to remember the mail distribution scheme for the whole state. Of couse, there was always help from the regulars on the run. If you couldn't remember where to throw a piece of mail, you just shouted out the name of the post office and someone would tell you where to put it. Heaven help you if they heard you shout out the same name twice, or they might tell you where to stick it.
In those four months I was on the road most of the time. I had runs to Redding, Klamath Falls, Bakersfield, Los Angeles, Reno or Sparks. When you couldn't take it any more because you needed a couple days off, you just didn't answer the phone.
The modus operandi in the postal car was that everyone worked hard until all the mail was sorted; then, on the long routes, there usually would be two or three hours when everyone sacked out--literally "sacked out." Empty mail sacks were laid between the racks that held the open mail sacks, making nice little hammocks. When those diesels were growling up the grade to get over the Sierra Nevada it was great sleeping. The coastal trip to Los Angeles was too beautiful even for sleeping; I would just stand in the doorway and watch the scenery go by.
On one of the trips to Sparks, Nevada, I was substituting for a regular who caught the mail bags from the moving train. It was necessary to peer through a little detachable window that was hung on the outside of the door so you could see the platform coming. There was a heavy, solid steel arm that hung outside the door so that when you pulled down on the handle, the arm was raised to snatch the mail bag from the post where it was hanging. The bag was cinched in the middle with a thick leather strap and held, top and bottom, with a break-away string. At the same time that you were snatching the outgoing mail bag, you had to boot the incoming mail bag onto the platform. Of course, the timing had to be just right. If you booted the mail bag out too soon or too late it could miss the platform, or worse, hit someone on the platform. If you raised the arm too soon you risked the danger of grabbing something hanging out of a car on a siding. If you raised it too late, you missed the outgoing mail. Then I missed one. The foreman rolled his eyes and said, "Well, the postmaster will be getting another complaint from Mr. Johnson because he didn't get his paper today."
The mail crews on these trains consisted of a foreman and four to six others. The foreman carried a loaded revolver on his belt. Frequently, the runs to Nevada would have registered mail bags full of silver dollars and occasionally there would be one containing a gold brick. The days of train robbers were long gone, but when you pulled into some whistle stop in the middle of the night you could never be sure what to expect.
The layovers in places like Reno or Sparks were wonderful. All the casinos had good entertainment and they were noted for good food at reasonable prices. I remember a great little restaurant near the station in Sparks where you could get a huge T-bone steak dinner for $1.25--and this was when you would pay ten times that much in San Francisco.
Occasionally I substituted on the highway post office (HPO). These were busses converted into mobile post offices; however, they were short lived. They were not much fun either. You had to strap yourself to the table where you sorted mail so you wouldn't get tossed around. The runs were short--usually out and back on the same night.
By 1970 nearly all of the RPO's and the HPO's were gone. The last RPO finished its service between New York and Washington, D.C. on 30 June 1977. With the spread of metropolital areas and the thinning of populations in rural areas, large postal distribution centers became the norm. Airplanes carried the mail from one highly-automated distribution center to another.
My career as a postal clerk was cut short one day when I returned from a trip and my landlady told me that the U.S. State Department had been trying to get me for two days. After seven months of security background investigation, the State Department wanted me in Washington immediately to start communication and cryptographic training. I was reluctant to give up my life on the rails, but life in the U.S. Foreign Service seemed more challenging.
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Follow these links to some interesting history of the railway postal service:
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Updated: 16 Sep 2009