What are on trains?

[Anonymous]

Lets say I recieved a letter in the mail from chicago or los angeles did that letter ever travel by train? How much mail and other parcels are transported by rail today? How far does a letter have to be sent to be transported by rail, a 1000 miles?

[Anonymous]

Unlikely. I don't know the exacty distance, but most first class mail is airmail or just trucked over shorter distances.

LC

[espeefoamer]

First class mail hasn't been hauled by train for many years.The last RPO route was WAS NYP abandoned in 1977.The rest of the routes were gone 10 years earlier.Bulk mail is still handled in TOFC service.

[mudchicken]

UPS overnight mail leaving LA on a Friday or Saturday night bound for Chicago and a Monday delivery "flies" out of LA on the last car of the train!

[Train Guy 3]

The last time mail was moved in mass quinties ( that i know of ) by rail was the week of 9-11-01. 3 or 4 days with all planes gounded the slack had to be picked up somewhere. Looks like the railroads help in time of crisis.

[Overmod]

The RPO may be gone, but last time I looked a significant amount of Philadelphia-New York mail still went via nighttime mail trains. Just because sorting doesn't happen en route doesn't mean the mail isn't still on the rails. Very interesting to watch long mail trains behind GG1s at considerably higher speed than we saw regular passenger trains running -- I would be prepared to admit speeds of 100mph at some points between Trenton and Princeton Junction (although I dimly remember that in the late '70s there was an 85mph restriction through Princeton Junction station itself due to the crossovers).

The fact that a post office sat directly over the west approaches to Penn Station helped somewhat with the logistics. That post office is now being converted into the 'new' Penn Station; it'll be interesting to see how mail continues to be handled (perhaps by offloading to the Harrison regional postal facility?)

[Anonymous]

Some of the Amtrak trains on the Northeat Corridor will go by with 8 to 12 road-railers, and, usually all but one are U.S. Mail (you can see the mail logos on them). The one odd road-railer is a refridgerated unit with no markings, but, it's usually always in the road-railer consist. Stealth lobsters from maine headed to Washington D.C. ??

[Overmod]

To clarify a bit, now that I actually read the question a bit more carefully:

It doesn't matter whether the trip is long or short. It matters whether the point-to-point volume is sufficient to deserve a rail trip, instead of being handled by truck.

Down South, at least, many of the city-to-city routes have been awarded to decidedly small-time independent operators. You can tell USPS trucking moves because they are clearly marked with the codes for the exchanging post offices. Some of the trailers I've seen are old, battered 20s with crudely HAND-LETTERED marks on them. It's probably hard to beat the economics of shoestring capital like this for much of the volume that goes between non-major post offices.

Volume between Chicago and LA might dictate carloads, but then again if coming from disparate areas, it still may make sense to run 50 trucks instead of one train which requires 50 trucks running many miles apiece to make up, and 50 trucks running many more miles to deliver upon yard arrival...

Personally, I'd be interested to see stats and breakdowns on how much of the Priority Mail traffic runs by rail, outside the Corridor.