The Railway Postal System
This system, which was suggested by the celebrated Rowland Hill, originated at a period in English postal history when the requirements of trade and commerce demanded a revisal of the code. Perhaps no man was better qualified for the purpose than was Mr. Hill. In 1839 railroad post-offices were in use for mail-bags. Each railway company provided a car, when desired to do so by the postmaster-general, for the exclusive use of the mails. These cars were fitted up with boxes to facilitate the distribution and reception of the mails. On the London and Liverpool Road (1839) it required the constant and active employment of two clerks to assort, receive, and hand out the mails: such is the rapidity of travel, and so numerous are the post-offices upon this route. Subsequently these cars were used for the distribution of letters in large cities, by assorting them on the routes. Not only were such distributions made on the cars for all the principal stations on the line of the railroads before the arrival of the cars, but distributions for the offices connected with the stations, and therefore incidentally for the entire district of country through which the lines are in operation. It was some time before our postal department could be made sensible of the necessity of the system in our country. Perhaps no other country in the world possessed a larger amount of railroad travel and postal extent than ours, and yet the spirit of old fogyism was hard to be subdued in the encounter Young America had with it on this subject, nor was it until the cars were almost forced upon the department (experimentally) that they were first introduced. These experiments were made on the routes from Chicago, Illinois, to Clinton, Davenport, and Dubuque, Iowa, with the most satisfactory results, as were those between Washington and New York. The attention of the public was called to this new postal system by the postmaster-general (William Dennison) in his report for the fiscal year 1864, who stated “that cars requisite for the purpose are prepared for one daily line between New York and Washington, and, by means of clerks taken temporarily from the post-offices at Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, letters intended for distribution at either of these points are distributed in the cars, and so arranged that they can be despatched without delay on connecting routes.”
Among the railroads upon which these cars are placed are the Pennsylvania Central, between Philadelphia and Pittsburg: in fact, the system is now so fully established that it has become an essential element in the whole organization of the postal department. Those employed in the several post-offices from which the light of order radiates, under this new system, can fully appreciate the advantages resulting from it, as merchants and others already acknowledge
“This radiated head of the Phœnix,”
as it rises above the ashes of the old fogy system.
Mail-matter from every direction will reach our citizens much earlier,—in most cases several hours sooner. This will show at once how essential to our merchants is this new improvement: nor can we at this early period of its introduction calculate all the advantages likely to result from it. The idea of a post-office performing its distributing duties on a railway, going at the rate of thirty miles an hour, is one of those scintillations of genius which only emits light once in a century,—that century the present.49