A question about prototype operations of mail trains

Its not likely that a branchline would have a dedicated mail train. In many cases the mail contract was what covered the cost of running the passenger service. Many local trains were discontinued when the contract was lost. 1964 was the "blood bath" year for termination of rpos. The LIRR had several until that year but as far as I know there were no mail trains, just a baggage/rpo combo on the locals.

The mail contract money was so important that when they converted the Bablylon-Patchogue shuttle to RDC cars they equiped an MU rpo with an undercar generator and switched it from the mu train at Babylon to the pair of RDC cars to take the mail to Patchogue. (which voided the warranty from Budd)

Probably more than you want to know but moving the mail can add a lot of interest.

RPO's were pretty much captive to the individual railroads, as that where the sorting of mail took place.  The schemes (as they were known as,) for sorting mail were set up for online and local destinations.  Bulk mail traveling further would get placed in a mail sack and handed over to appropriate RPO or mail storage car at the receiving terminal.  Mail storage cars (baggage cars, converted troop sleepers, express boxcars) however could travel far afield from the home road as the mail would be blocked internally for their destination post offices.

Rusty

I'm sure it's on the net somewhere, but RPO "post office"sizes were dictated by the contracts with the US Post Office.   Thus, RPO cars have certain sized mail sections. 

Of course you will have to distinguish between bulk mail service or mail sorted en route via an RPO.     Also, I'm pretty sure that Railway Express (REA) operations are completely separate from US mail handling as both are separate business entities.

Rule292 posted:

I'm sure it's on the net somewhere, but RPO "post office"sizes were dictated by the contracts with the US Post Office.   Thus, RPO cars have certain sized mail sections. 

Of course you will have to distinguish between bulk mail service or mail sorted en route via an RPO.     Also, I'm pretty sure that Railway Express (REA) operations are completely separate from US mail handling as both are separate business entities.

Think of the Railway Express Agency as the FedEx of it's time.

Rusty

Redshirt214 posted:

Also, a question about RPOs... did they ever "run through" on mail routes, so that it was thus possible for certain trains to have cars of different road names/liveries? I know a lot of prototype mail cars were probably mainly in pullman green, but did it ever happen?

Hartford was home of many insurance companies and as such had occasions to deliver an extraordinary amount of literature to policyholders in the western United States.  Bulk mailing rates were such that sending carloads for mailing from Kansas City was less expensive than mailing from Hartford.  Therefore, carload shipments via REA cars to a Kansas City post office were not unusual.  A car could be routed NH-NYCity-PRR-Chicago-ATSF-KC.  The REA cars could be leased boxcars, leased refrigerator cars or heavyweight baggage cars marked for REA service so you could have seen a New Haven heavyweight baggage car in a Santa Fe train.

A StLSF mail storage car in REA service.  Railroad contracts with the Post Office and REA stated the railroad would haul all freight tendered.   I am sure with your interest in this subject your search on the Internet will find photographs of mail storage cars on foreign roads.

As stated above, it would be unusual for an RPO to be on a foreign road.

John in Lansing, ILL

Mail trains were all different animals.  I am personally familiar with three of them:

• Southern Pacific's Coast Mail, which ran between the Bay Area and Los Angeles via the Coast Route, the same route that follows the California Coast, used by the Coast Daylight.  In the 1960's it had a working RPO, and several heavyweight baggage cars with storage mail.  It had a rider coach on the rear, and I think you could buy a ticket to ride it.  It was not a long train -- ten cars or less every time I saw it -- but was abundantly powered by three F-units, a pair of PA's and/or E9's, or sometimes three units of mixed 4 and 6 axle passenger units.  Occasionally, on weekends, a pair of F-M Train Masters was the power.
• Union Pacific Numbers 5 and 6 were 12-15 car trains powered by 3 or 4 E8/E9 units.  They had one chair car at the end in 1967, but had previously been a no-frills accommodation train with two or three chair cars (no diner, no sleeper) for those needing to travel to and from stations with low population between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles.  It was often the train of choice for Union Pacific business car movements, as it arrived and departed Los Angeles during the night.  This train was mostly Union Pacific equipment, although C&NW and Milwaukee Road cars were also used.  It had more lightweight baggage cars than the SP or ATSF mail trains, and the heavyweights it carried were mostly modernized.
• Santa Fe 7 and 8, the Fast Mail was often run in sections.  Each train, powered by 3 or 4 Alco passenger diesels, or 4 or 5 rednose F-units, carried 10 to 18 cars, with lots of heavyweight Santa Fe baggage cars for storage and express, a few foreign line baggage cars, a heavyweight RPO and a heavyweight combine express and chair car.  Express boxcars from Santa Fe, Missouri Pacific, Pennsylvania, and New York Central were not uncommon.  Some of the Pennsy and NYC cars were converted troop sleepers.  You could buy a ticket, but virtually all riders were deadheading railroad crews.

One thing all three of these trains had in common was enough horsepower to maintain 30 MPH wide-open on a 2.2% ascending grade.

A railroad MAY lease a RPO from another IF for some reason it was short of required cars for the run.  Generally it used its own RPO for M&E trains.  Most of these trains run on one system.  Only storage mail cars would be interchanged to other roads.

Out of range for this thread, it was common for RPO cars to be interchanged as head end cars on passenger trains which ran over multiple lines.  UP cars came over onto the SP on the CITY trains, and RI onto the SP on the GOLDEN STATE route trains.

The best way to model these is to find a train and time period to model, and do a lot of reading and Googling.  Historical groups of the road you are looking at may help.

The great thing about M&E trains is that the consists changed each day, so one has a slight latitude about to put in your trains.

BTW, I have run a SP BW TM as power on a model M&E.  Glad I made that call.

The NYC did have converted group sleepers.  I thought PRR had hundreds of converted X29 boxcars.

I have a few photos of the interior of the RE A mail car from Spencer ND transportation museum.

Exterior of the car is Olive

I recall that back in the late 50's the Lackawanna operated a special mail train during the Christmas season on the 22-mile Gladstone Branch. The consist was a GP-7/9, one or maybe two baggage cars and a "Wyatt Earp" rider coach.   The regular RPO on the electrified line was an EMU combine.  It is reported that the Summit & Gladstone line was the shortest RPO run in the US.

I suspect I'll have to use some artistic license with the way I make up the train, especially regarding length. I think the max my layout can handle would be a consist of either three heavyweight coaches, or a pair of heavyweights and a pair of 40ft boxcars. Would reefers or milk cars also have occasionally been mixed in to mail trains? Or just a mix of bulk mail storage, RPO, and REA boxcars?

Mail trains were just that, trains devoted to carrying the mail. 

Milk was handled differently.  Usually in passenger trains, fast freights or occasionally their own train.  Here's an article about milk transport.

Rusty

I recall a trip on Santa Fe #7 from Bakersfield to Richmond just a few days before Christmas in about 1963. There were about 26 cars on the train. Maybe two coaches, the rest baggage cars and express cars. I think there was one RPO. The volume of mail was so heavy that entire baggage cars were unloaded at some stops. Each stop would run 15 to 45 minutes. The train frequently would double or triple stop at a station. This was all done at night. As I recall we were to get into Richmond at about 11PM but it was around 5AM when we finally got there.  The operation of the train was completely normal when running. All the time was lost at long station stops when they were working the mail cars.  I got off at some stations, but you had to keep track of the conductor, as you never knew when the train was going to move forward to get more mail cars on the platform.

I recall riding a UP mail train across Wyoming at night. I got on at Laramie.  I and a small group of passengers were on the platform with nothing but mail cars in sight.  Someone came up to us and said the coaches are that way. We started walking.  The platform ended and we kept walking. Walked right through the main line fueling facility.   Finally got to the coach where the door was open and there was a step box, but nobody around. We all got on. That is a train that really needed to be double stopped.  I do not recall the date, but it was on that trip I saw the four truck Alco road units. The amount of smoKe  they put when they started was the most I have ever seen.  I think they were just demonstrators and were not around too long. Lots of turbines too. 

Yes, milk trains were usually run on their own in the early morning hours, collecting raw milk and rushing it to a nearby big city dairy for processing. However, "ME" trains (Mail and Express) often had mail cars and express, so could include express reefers sometimes.

Generally RPOs were used to sort mail that would be dropped off during the run of the train. So a train starting at city A and running to city F would sort mail to be dropped off at cities B, C, D and E...plus you could have mail picked up at city B that would be sorted to go to C, D, E or F too. RPOs were normally exclusive to that line, and wouldn't be seen on another railroad. However, mail storage cars - like a locked baggage car full of mail - could be moved onto another railroad.

A branchline would be more likely to use a combination car with a 15 or 30 foot RPO section, since very little mail would usually need to be sorted en route. Some railroads had "triple combines" with a baggage section, passenger section, and small RPO section.

Kent Loudon posted:

I recall that back in the late 50's the Lackawanna operated a special mail train during the Christmas season on the 22-mile Gladstone Branch. The consist was a GP-7/9, one or maybe two baggage cars and a "Wyatt Earp" rider coach.   The regular RPO on the electrified line was an EMU combine.  It is reported that the Summit & Gladstone line was the shortest RPO run in the US.

 

Therr were a few interurban and streetcar lines with RPO compatments, so it is possible one of those lines had the shortest RPO service.

Here is a link that may help you get an idea on how to create a mail train.

If you're interested you should check out the Mobile Post Office Society devoted to RPOs and HPOs in great detail. They also have several publications about postmarks, routes and etc.

MPOS

Locomotive, RPO, Baggage, Coach, all rolled up into one:

Rusty

An interesting bit of trivia is the fact that transportation by rail (as opposed to say, stagecoach) reduced costs so dramatically that the Post Office was able to set a fixed rate for First Class letters, regardless of distance traveled. 

There is an informative book by the C&O Historical folks that might help you.

http://chessieshop.com/index.p...amp;products_id=3295

Where were RPO cars usually positioned in the train, were they separated from the regular passenger cars by a baggage car, which would prevent passengers from trying to access the RPO, or were they connected to the passenger cars, with their doors just locked to keep out non-postal employees, so that the RPO personnel had access to the diner?

Bill in FtL

Ideally, the RPO should be isolated from the rest of the train via baggage or mail storage cars.  Sometimes, that wasn't possible.  Regardless, the doors to the RPO were always locked and the clerks were armed.  They did not leave the RPO for meals, they essentially "brown bagged" them.

My personal preference is, I always run RPO's with the mail sorting compartment forward:

Rusty

Redshirt214 posted:

Would reefers or milk cars also have occasionally been mixed in to mail trains?

Redshirt

Check out this info on O scale express reefers.

https://ogrforum.com/...-and-express-reefers

Does your branch line have farms and packing houses that originate highly valuable and highly perishable foods?  In the Pacific Northwest Yakima valley cherries and fresh salmon often moved on passenger trains or, at the peak of the season, passenger extras in express reefers.

A sideline to modeling mail trains is collecting RPO postmarks. They give the route-usually the two end points, a date and often a train number. You might be able to collect a cover that actually traveled on one of your favorite trains.

A cover of interest is the first run of the Empire State Express which is printed on the envelope and postmarked Dec 7, 1941.

Loads of info and books available through the MPOS.

A friend says father who rode Pennsy RPO cars got coffee and presumably food in diner while enroute.

I thought one could not leave the RPO part of the train unless you were putting main onto or off the train, or were being recrewed in route.

I suppose it would be a good idea to have the mail pickup hook facing forward.

Kent Loudon posted:

I suppose it would be a good idea to have the mail pickup hook facing forward.

Yes, that's why the mail pick-up "hooks" were reversible.

I have two boxes of practice sorting cards, one for Indiana and the other for part of Ohio if anyone is interested. These were used by new clerks to practice their routes for proficiency exams. 

If you can locate passenger train consists for any particular road, they will list train name, number, route and the names/type of each car on the train. Wayner Publications published several of these during the 1970s for railroads across the US. Many span the 1920s - 1960s era. 

There is also the Railway Mail Service Library, located in the original N&W station in VA. It is run by Frank Sheer, and has several books and videos of railway mail service available for purchase.

Normally if you had a car that was a combination baggage (or express) / RPO, the RPO part would be isolated. That end of the car often wouldn't have a door / diaphragm to allow moving to another car in the train, and no door between the RPO and baggage areas. Sometimes in that situation, a sorting table would be built in place crossways blocking where the door to the other part of the car would be, but with a small hatch underneath where you could crawl from one section to the other in an emergency. The fear always was that a robber could get on the train as a passenger, rob the RPO section, and hop off as the train pulled into the next station and disappear into the crowd of people.

However some RPOs (more likely full RPOs) did have connections to other cars, so that you could have an RPO in the middle of two baggage cars filled with sacked mail, so the clerks could sort that mail while en route.

Redshirt214 posted:

I suspect I'll have to use some artistic license with the way I make up the train, especially regarding length. I think the max my layout can handle would be a consist of either three heavyweight coaches, or a pair of heavyweights and a pair of 40ft boxcars. Would reefers or milk cars also have occasionally been mixed in to mail trains? Or just a mix of bulk mail storage, RPO, and REA boxcars?

HAving been in the railroad business from 1959 to 1980, I'm quite familiar with how mil trains were operated.

In regard to Red's above question, one needs to make a clear distinction between freight and passenger service.

Mail and express were not considered to be freight, and they moved in passenger trains with passenger type brake systems.  Mail and express generally moved in baggage cars.  An RPO was simply a baggae car with a mail sorting compartment, at one end of the car if a 15 or 30 foot compartment, a whole car if a 60 foot.  The converted army sleepers used in express cars were for practical purposes a baggage car with a different shape.

You would not have seen reefers or milk cars in M&E trains.  Reefers were freight cars.  M&E trains operated at passenger speeds and could not have freight cars, so no reefers or milk cars.

Milk is another story, too complicated to bring into this conversation.

Been posted before but it's a good vintage documentary of "Post Office Department" RPO operations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hAA3AQxW-Y

Redshirt214 posted:

Thinking about possibly putting together a local mail train, a kind of branchline version of "The Fast Mail". Dose anyone have prototype shots of such trains? I am thinking perhaps adding a baggage car, and a mail or REA boxcar\reefer to the combine & Alco FA that serve in passenger service on my layout.

Also, a question about RPOs... did they ever "run through" on mail routes, so that it was thus possible for certain trains to have cars of different road names/liveries? I know a lot of prototype mail cars were probably mainly in pullman green, but did it ever happen?

In regard to "run-through" RPO's.  RPO's ran on specific city to city routes designated by the Post Office in a contract with a railroad, or occasionally two or three railroads.  Because each railroad used its RPO cars to fill its own contracts with the post office, interline sevice was the exception.  RPO cars that ran through were usually in through streamliners that had an RPO built especially for that train.  I'm having a hard time imagining where you might ever have seen RPO's with two different liveries in the same train.

rattler21 posted:

Redshirt214 posted:

Also, a question about RPOs... did they ever "run through" on mail routes, so that it was thus possible for certain trains to have cars of different road names/liveries? I know a lot of prototype mail cars were probably mainly in pullman green, but did it ever happen?

Hartford was home of many insurance companies and as such had occasions to deliver an extraordinary amount of literature to policyholders in the western United States.  Bulk mailing rates were such that sending carloads for mailing from Kansas City was less expensive than mailing from Hartford.  Therefore, carload shipments via REA cars to a Kansas City post office were not unusual.  A car could be routed NH-NYCity-PRR-Chicago-ATSF-KC.  The REA cars could be leased boxcars, leased refrigerator cars or heavyweight baggage cars marked for REA service so you could have seen a New Haven heavyweight baggage car in a Santa Fe train.

A StLSF mail storage car in REA service.  Railroad contracts with the Post Office and REA stated the railroad would haul all freight tendered.   I am sure with your interest in this subject your search on the Internet will find photographs of mail storage cars on foreign roads.

As stated above, it would be unusual for an RPO to be on a foreign road.

John in Lansing, ILL

From an operations perspective, a baggage car was a mail storage car was an express car and physically could configured as a regular baggage car, converted troop sleeper (the REA cars), or box car, as long as it had high spped trucks and passenger braking.

The post office and Railway Express contracted for a certan amount of car footage Common increments being 10, 15, 20, 30, 60 feet).  It didn't matter what the car looked like on the outside and the ownership was up to the railroads and of no concern to REX or the PO.  The exception was the express messenger car used for valuable shipment that required a custodian.  They had to have facilities for the messenger and were marked as such.  That didn't mean the railroad couldn't use them for other purposes, but only a correct car could be used for messenger serviced.

Number 90 posted:

Mail trains were all different animals.  I am personally familiar with three of them:

• Southern Pacific's Coast Mail, which ran between the Bay Area and Los Angeles via the Coast Route, the same route that follows the California Coast, used by the Coast Daylight.  In the 1960's it had a working RPO, and several heavyweight baggage cars with storage mail.  It had a rider coach on the rear, and I think you could buy a ticket to ride it.  It was not a long train -- ten cars or less every time I saw it -- but was abundantly powered by three F-units, a pair of PA's and/or E9's, or sometimes three units of mixed 4 and 6 axle passenger units.  Occasionally, on weekends, a pair of F-M Train Masters was the power.
• Union Pacific Numbers 5 and 6 were 12-15 car trains powered by 3 or 4 E8/E9 units.  They had one chair car at the end in 1967, but had previously been a no-frills accommodation train with two or three chair cars (no diner, no sleeper) for those needing to travel to and from stations with low population between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles.  It was often the train of choice for Union Pacific business car movements, as it arrived and departed Los Angeles during the night.  This train was mostly Union Pacific equipment, although C&NW and Milwaukee Road cars were also used.  It had more lightweight baggage cars than the SP or ATSF mail trains, and the heavyweights it carried were mostly modernized.
• Santa Fe 7 and 8, the Fast Mail was often run in sections.  Each train, powered by 3 or 4 Alco passenger diesels, or 4 or 5 rednose F-units, carried 10 to 18 cars, with lots of heavyweight Santa Fe baggage cars for storage and express, a few foreign line baggage cars, a heavyweight RPO and a heavyweight combine express and chair car.  Express boxcars from Santa Fe, Missouri Pacific, Pennsylvania, and New York Central were not uncommon.  Some of the Pennsy and NYC cars were converted troop sleepers.  You could buy a ticket, but virtually all riders were deadheading railroad crews.

One thing all three of these trains had in common was enough horsepower to maintain 30 MPH wide-open on a 2.2% ascending grade.

UP 5 and 6 were not what people in the railroad business would call a "mail train".  We thought of a mail train as one that did not carry passengers.  If any passenger with a ticket could ride on it, it was from the railroader's perspective a passenger train.

BTW, although called "mail trains" most were really mail and express trains.

Dominic Mazoch posted:

The NYC did have converted group sleepers.  I thought PRR had hundreds of converted X29 boxcars.

Right.  Those X-29's were equipped for passenger service.

Rusty Traque posted:

Ideally, the RPO should be isolated from the rest of the train via baggage or mail storage cars.  Sometimes, that wasn't possible.  Regardless, the doors to the RPO were always locked and the clerks were armed.  They did not leave the RPO for meals, they essentially "brown bagged" them.

My personal preference is, I always run RPO's with the mail sorting compartment forward:

Rusty

The majority of photos from that era show the RPO compartment forward.  But seeing it to the rear is njhot unusual.  Most man line passenger trains were turned on a wye.  Where it was not convenient to wye the train and the head end cars were switched form one end to the orhte, half of the RPO movement had to be with the mail compartment to the rear.

Dominic Mazoch posted:

I thought one could not leave the RPO part of the train unless you were putting main onto or off the train, or were being recrewed in route.

Regulations are one thing, actual practice another.  I'll give 93 to 1 odds he got down from the mail car and walked to the passenger cars.  If it was in the middle of the run, odds of getting caught violating PO regulations were low.

Coming back to the original question about operations on the Cleveland & Western.  Redshirt has given us a thre or four car limit.  That actually makes it very easy to simulate a 50'0 operation with mostly head end cars.  There were many branch line locals with two or three head end cars and a coach.  I some case only a combine and head end cars.  Many had RPO cars and many did not.  A 15 foot mail compartment was most likely, maybe 30, never a full car.

HEre are two examples of trains that I rode.

In 1953, I rode a CP train on a 160 mile branch line run.  It was an RPO-baggage, baggage car and coach.  I know that part of the baggage car was used for express because I helped load what seemed like a cubic acre of potato chips into it at one station (northern Maine).  At an intermediate point where the power was changed from a 4-6-0 to a 4-6-2, we picked up another baggage car - express or mail storage, you can't tell by looking.

At the end of that trip, I rode the MEC Mountain Divisionfrom St. Johnsbury to Portland.  Consis behind an E-7 was RPO-baggage, baggage car and coach.  At Quebec Jct. we picked up two milk cars.

With three to five cars, you've got a lot of realistic options.  Two coaches and a few and cars on a more heavily travleed branch line.