RPO Questions

[pajrr]

Hi, I have some questions about Railway Post Office cars. Who designed and built them? Were they built by the USPS or by the railroads themselves? If the railroads built them did the USPS have any say in the design or specifications that the railroads had to follow? I know that they were staffed by USPS employees. Were railroad employees (namely conductors) allowed in them except in cases of extreme emergency? Any info anyone can provide will be appreciated. Thank you. pajrr

[rcdrye]

RPO "apartments" were specified by the United States Post Office (USPS was MUCH later).  15-foot, 30-foot and 60-foot designs were normally specified.  RPO apartments were not usually provided with end doors, except for a hatch to allow bags of "storage mail" to be moved to and from "storage mail" cars, which were not much different from ordinary baggage cars.  60-foot "apartments" usually took up an entire car, the 15 and 30 footers were often combined with express, baggage or passenger-carrying space.

RPO cars were clearly marked "United States Mail Railway Post Office".

[CSSHEGEWISCH]

The Post Office Department had pretty detailed specs about the type and location of interior fittings such as sorting cases, racks for mail sacks, etc. that had to be followed.  The cars themselves were built by the various carbuilders and were owned by the individual railroads.

[ndbprr]

Due to their vulnerable position at the head end it was also an extremely dangerous profession when a train left the rails.

[MidlandMike]

The Rio Grande "Chili Line" NG mixed train had an RPO with a catwalk and grab rail installed on the roof, so the train crew could access the whole train with passing thru the RPO.

[wjstix]

The cars were built for and owned by the railroads, but to USPO specifications. It was part of the cost of being awarded the lucrative mail contract. In the late 19th or very early 20th century the gov't ordered all cars carrying mail and postal employees to have steel underframes. Somewhere around 1910 they decided that postal cars had to be all steel. This did a lot to speed up the conversion by the railroads from wood cars to steel cars...kinda hard to explain to your passengers that the reason the RPO in their train is steel is because it's safer, while the passenger is riding in a wood car. 

There normally would be no reason for a conductor or other railroad employee to go into an RPO car. A car that was part RPO and part baggage or express would often be divided so that RR personnel could get into the baggage part from the rest of the train, but either would have no access or limited access to the RPO section. (Some cars had a small hatch below the end sorting desks of the RPO section that you could crawl through to get into the other part of the car.) 

That all being said, there were times the RPO clerks would need to access other cars. On a long run, you might have an RPO car located between two baggage cars, with the baggage cars carrying sacked mail. This way, the clerks could go into the baggage cars to get the sacks and sort them en route.

[Deggesty]

Hmm; I had the impression that all of the mail in a storage car marked to be set out at a certain place was for that place. Though, if the clerks were caught up with their work in the RPO they might have had time to sort mail in a storag car for delivery.

I do not remember: were the mail storage cars in front of the RPO so as to isolate them from the train crew?

[dakotafred]

wjstix

There normally would be no reason for a conductor or other railroad employee to go into an RPO car. A car that was part RPO and part baggage or express would often be divided so that RR personnel could get into the baggage part from the rest of the train, but either would have no access or limited access to the RPO section. (Some cars had a small hatch below the end sorting desks of the RPO section that you could crawl through to get into the other part of the car.) 

That all being said, there were times the RPO clerks would need to access other cars. On a long run, you might have an RPO car located between two baggage cars, with the baggage cars carrying sacked mail. This way, the clerks could go into the baggage cars to get the sacks and sort them en route.

 

On our railroad, U.P., part of the RPO deal was a railroad-provided MAIL PILER (U.P.'s job title), who fed locked pouches to the postal clerks from an adjacent baggage car. Don't know who ultimately paid him, but he was definitely a railroad, as opposed to postal, employee.

[dakotafred]

wjstix

The cars were built for and owned by the railroads, but to USPO specifications. It was part of the cost of being awarded the lucrative mail contract.

Yes, and one thing that leads me to believe the rails were more or less blindsided by cancellation of their first-class mail contracts in 1967 is that at least one, Santa Fe, bought new RPOs as late as 1964. U.P. might have bought some more at about that time.

What a dirty trick! (Unless the rails flat missed some handwriting on the wall.) 

[AgentKid]

wjstix

That all being said, there were times the RPO clerks would need to access other cars.

I have read that on very long runs in Canada, at certain station stops, men and baggage carts would be deployed to move sacks of mail between cars as required. It sounded like these moving jobs were set up by contract between the RR and the P.O., and the men reported to the job whether it was going to be needed that day or not.

Bruce

 

[16-567D3A]

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[dakotafred]

Great report, 16 -- thanks. I'm going to print it out for future reference. It's got more detail than the Classic Trains story on RPOs of a few years ago.

One note: With RPOs, of course, we're talking about First Class mail. Although the Post Office switched some other mail to rail freight service starting at about the same time -- wiping out a whole mail train on the U.P., for instance -- some railroads, including U.P., still retained some significant Second thru Fourth on surviving trains.

It wasn't as well-paying, though; U.P. estimates the loss of First Class cost it two-thirds of its former mail revenue.

[wabash2800]

There was a photo of a Soo Line train on trainorders recently with a baggage car btw the engine and the RPO. I suppose I'm used to seeing the baggage car holding mail behind the RPO. But the same train has another baggage car on the end of the train behind the coaches.

Victor A. Baird

www.erstwhilepublications.com

 

"That all being said, there were times the RPO clerks would need to access other cars. On a long run, you might have an RPO car located between two baggage cars, with the baggage cars carrying sacked mail. This way, the clerks could go into the baggage cars to get the sacks and sort them en route."

[wjstix]

A good point about mail at stations,  the mail wasn't just going from point A to point B. Mail could be picked up and dropped off at intermediate cities along the train's journey. RPO clerks would be taking some of the mail from where the train started at, and  sorting it into bags to be dropped off along the way. Other mail sacks were picked up for the end point city, or towns along the way.