Did heavyweight passenger trains that only operated weekly (or let´s say not daily) have a RPO car or BPO car in their consist during the 30s and 40s?
I once heard that only daily trains featured RPO/BPO cars in their consist, but I´m not sure if this info is true...
Many trains with RPO's operated daily except Sunday, or daily except Saturday and Sunday, or daily except Saturday, Sunday, and holidays. Some of the PRR's mail trains operated daily, but some specific cars of those trains would be operated only on specific days. Without looking it up, I seem to recall that a mail train carried a specific express car (not an RPO, as I recall) once a week to handle the weekly Saturday Evening Post Magazine.
Tom
As far as I can see, there weren't that many heavyweight trains that operated on non-daily or at least non-daily except Sunday schedules. I'm assuming you mean trains like the Forty-Niner, the Arizona Limited, or the Orange Blossom Special. I don't believe any of these did, but maybe you could clarify what you mean.
It would be unlikely you'd have a mail contract on a line that only had enough mail to warrant one train a week. Keep in mind the mail contract often was the reason for the train, since it often made the difference between losing money and making money (or at least breaking even) for the railroad. You could see a local train back then with 2-3 baggage / RPO cars with a single passenger coach on the rear.
Normally RPOs would be used on lines that required sorting of mail en route by postal employees; otherwise a baggage car or express boxcar would just handle sacked mail.
FWIW it's hard now to appreciate how much mail was sent back then. My dad started working for the Post Office in Minneapolis in 1943; in the forties, he said it wasn't unusual for people to send and receive 2-300 Christmas cards each year for example. Letter Carriers often carried their route twice in one day, delivering mail in the morning and again in the afternoon.
Not sure if it was mail or express, but I recall reading a story about a Boston & Main train that handled the Sunday papers to points out of Boston north.
Some papers were handled as mail, but not sure whether this applied to the Sunday paper. I think I remember my uncle and aunt on the farm would get the Indianapolis Star deleivered by mail and the Sunday paper would arrive on Monday, so somehow it got in the mail to make it downstate to them with their rural carrier delivery around midday IIRC. But perhaps I've got that garbled and a paper carrier handled the Sunday paper, while the other days came a day later in the mail???
So maybe Sunday-only trains might handle this sort of traffic as either mail or express. This could include Saturday evening trains, as some papers went to press with the Sunday edition that early for outlying areas.
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL
The train I´m interested in is the Missouri Pacific / Texas & Pacific / Nacionales de Mexico "City of Mexico" which existed only from June 1937 till December 1940 and was a real deluxe all sleeper international through train between St. Louis and Mexico City on a weekly basis, leaving St. Louis on Sunday evening and arriving in Mexico City 48 hours later on Tuesday evening, leaving Mexico City on Thursday evening and arriving in St. Louis on Saturday evening. I found detailed consist infos of this train except for the headend cars which aren´t mentioned at all. I would like to find out more about the headend cars and I strongly assume that a baggage car was part of the consist, but I´m not sure about a RPO or BPO car. I doubt it had a RPO or BPO car since it was only a weekly train, but I don´t know that for sure because I never ever saw a single photo of that train yet in my life. So I would like to know that because then I would know if I´ll need to buy a RPO/BPO too for this train, as I´m planning to model it (it´s weird that I´m going to model a train I never saw a single photo of!). But my question was not only because of this particular train. It´s general because I´m generelly interested in knowing if non daily heavyweight passenger trains featured RPO/BPO cars or if this was only the norm with daily trains in the heavyweight era. I know only one example where it was for sure like this: on the Santa Fe the weekly De Luxe didn´t have a RPO/BPO (not even a full baggage car but only a baggage club lounge instead) but the daily California Limited had them of course.
Normally, mailmen wouldn't deliver the newspaper, except a few "national" papers, like the Wall Street Journal. In that time, enough people took the paper (even in rural areas) that the newpaper would hire delivery people. It wouldn't be unusual for a newspaper to send copies of the paper by train as express to a city/town depot, where it would be picked up by a newspaper employee and distributed to subscribers and retailers.
I know the old Minneapolis Tribune for years had a "blue streak" edition that was printed up before the regular run of the next day's paper started, it usually was printed in the late afternoon or early evening so it could be sent to the GN or Milwaukee Road depot in downtown Minneapolis and be sent out to rural Minnesota. The Sunday paper usually has the biggest printing of the week - back then, people were so anxious to read about Saturday's Gopher football game that the paper printed the Sunday sports section on special peach colored paper, so folks could find the sports section easier.
Mail train service usually involved stopping fairly often to drop off or pick up mail, so normally a railroad's top passenger trains would not carry mail. It would be a lesser train, either a "fast mail" specifically designed to just carry mail (perhaps with one coach or combine at the end) or as part of a lower-level local passenger train.
The thing about non-daily deluxe trains is that they would have been backed up by daily regular trains on the same route, which would be much more likely to carry RPOs. I would go from the assumption that such trains didn't have them, but be prepared to be surprised in further research.
You will need to look through books to find photo's of the trains. Obviously the public timetables won't give you the info you want but for the most part there are photo's of every train that ran in this country.
The Kratville or Beebe books would be a good place to start.
Randy Stahl You will need to look through books to find photo's of the trains. Obviously the public timetables won't give you the info you want but for the most part there are photo's of every train that ran in this country. The Kratville or Beebe books would be a good place to start.
Beebe and Clegg's books are EXACTLY the place where I would expect to find a photo. Well, "expect" is being way to optimistic; but still, those books are worth a look.
I guess I assume Kratville is/was UP only--could be wrong.
Ed