RPO Car Destinations?

Image: Wikipedia

With Chicago's Union Station, Northwestern Station, Dearborn Street Station, Central Station and Grand Central Stations, serving around 30 railroads, all in close proximity to the Chicago old main post office (2.5 million square feet of mail sorting dynamics, the largest mail sorting facility in the world, now closed.) bulk sorted mail moved via trucks between the post office and stations to be loaded on to mail storage cars and RPO's to be sorted further enroute. 

There were no tracks leading into it, under it or along side it that I can recall.

Rusty

Check out Brian Scace's article on page 22 - click below

www.oscalemag.com/docs/ost_8.pdf

And was that building built so later the "Dirty Dan" Expressway could be constructed through it without having to redo the building?

No. That is NOT the Dan Ryan Expressway. That is the Congress Expressway, now known as the Ike!

Rusty - Re the Chicago Post Office adjacent to Union Station, I probably rode by it numerous times but was unable to see RPO/mail storage car unloading, but it would seem to make sense that loading/unloading facilities would be incorporated in it's design. Otherwise, why have it adjacent to the downtown stations if the mail was just going to be trucked around? There were numerous tracks and switching facilities south of Roosevelt Road which allowed for the transfer of cars from one station to another, and to the post office, which was right on the throat tracks of Union Station.

        Another grand design with an incorporated post office built simultaneously (as well as a roundhouse, coaling facilities, etc.) was Cincinnati Union Terminal, completed in approx. 1933. Would assume such cities as Omaha, St. Paul, Kansas City, Denver, and St. Louis, all "gateway" cities, would have had similar facilities.

Los Angeles had the Postal Annex on the Union Terminal property, and the Post Office was right across the street.  Mail cars did not run through the terminal -- they either originated or terminated there.  They were spotted at the annex and the mail went directly to or from the Post Office.

I think the kind of distribution center you're talking about is something more recent, in the 'rail by truck' era. In the old days, big city post offices were often built downtown near the railroad stations (and vice versa).

My Dad's career job was working for the US Post Office / USPS in Minneapolis. His first job as a mail handler in 1943 was going from the main downtown Mpls post office over to the Milwaukee Road station to pick up and drop off sacks of mail. Both the Milwaukee and Great Northern stations were within a block or so of the main post office.

Similarly, in St.Paul, the main downtown post office building is next door to St. Paul Union Depot. BTW I just went to the grand re-opening of the restored SPUD on Saturday. Starting late in 2013 will be used as a railroad station again for the first time since 1971. (After Amtrak decided not to stop there, it was used as storage by the post office.) It also will serve light rail and busses, and eventually may serve "heavy" commuter rail trains.

Can't speak for the other cities.

While CUS is right across the street and B&O's Grand Central was about a block or two away, Dearborn Street Station is on the other side of the river, Northwestern a couple of blocks north of CUS and IC's Central Station was on the other side of Michigan Avenue, couple of blocks south of Congress Parkway.

The trouble with bringing RPO's to the Chicago Post Office is clutter. You'd be tying up station throats at the depots with the switch moves and probably having them stack up at the post office. One thing goes wrong and everybody's mail train is late.

To get from Northwestern Station, you have to switch over to the Milwaukee Road tracks, use the run through tracks at CUS, then switch your way over to the Post Office, (assuming there were loading tracks there.)  RPO's and storage cars from Dearborn and Central would have to use the Air Line or some other longer route and do some other switching to eventually get to the Post Office.

While all this is going on, there's the regular scheduled passenger movements and switching occuring.

It takes time to load the RPO's and mail storage cars and not every car if filled to the brim with mail sacks.  Some mail is destined for other cities where it would be either placed on another train or go to the local post office for further sorting.  

It's more efficient, although more labor intensive, (labor was cheap, back then) to bring the mail to the cars than to bring the cars to the mail.  The mail could be staged in a secure area at the stations prior to the mail trains being brought in.

Rusty

Information from Brian's article

the car types required.

RPO

: A Railway Post Office. The equipment making up the RPO is a postal car and

as many storage cars as needed.

Postal Car

: The car where mail is actually sorted. These cars had sorting tables,

“pigeon holes,” and most had devices on the side doors to snag single mailbags without

stopping at smaller towns.

Storage Car

: Most commonly, a baggage

car attached to the postal car for the storage of mailbags to be sorted in the postal car.

After WWII, converted troop sleepers were often used as storage cars. Just about any

car built to operate at passenger train speeds could be found as a storage car, as long as it had end doors with diaphragms to allow Postal employees to pass between the storage

car and the postal car with mailbags while the train was moving.

The Railway Post Office

A Railway Post Office was a Post Office in a very real sense. Mail was received, sorted,

and delivered by the RPO just as it was in a fixed Post Office in your hometown. It

could be as small as a single postal car (often erroneously called an RPO in the

modeling and railfan press) or as large as a multi-section mail train.

Of course, this means that you’ll need a postal car. This is the car within which the

postal employees actually sort mail into pigeon holes, and bag the resulting sort in

locked canvas mailbags for delivery at the various stops made by the RPO on its

scheduled daily run.

.

Postal cars don’t have much storage space; they’re actually quite cramped. To

accommodate the mailbags for a larger city, the common baggage car becomes the next

type you’ll want, referred to as a “mail storage car.” RPOs ran on fixed routes from city

to city, so often there was a storage car coupled on one or both ends of the postal car

making up the RPO’s equipment. The end doors between the baggage and the postal

were a requirement, so mail bags could be passed into the postal car for sorting, and

returned to the storage car after being filled with sorted mail.

Rusty - Your analysis makes great sense! It does seem like an awful lot of additional loading and unloading, of which I am sure industrial engineers would be appalled! Do seem to recall in my high school depot lurkings(early '60's) that there were an abundance of piled high carts being hauled under ground by motorized tractors at CUS!  

Thanks, Mark. 

But I'm going to have to issue a partial correction.  It's been so long since I regularly rode the CB&Q/BN downtown, I forgot what things are like down there.  A simple thing like Google maps paints my face red...

There are tracks running under the Chicago Post Office.

The Chicago Post Office is directly over the south CUS station tracks.  The south end was used by the CB&Q, Pennsy, C&EI, Monon and GM&O.  There' probably one or two I missed.  These roads could be serviced directly by the post office.  I remember those higher platforms where mail was handled disappearing down ramps into the deeps of the station.  I don't know what it was like down there, but I imagine thats where the elevators were accessed to the P.O. 

The north tracks were used by the Milwaukee, I imagine they too had a direct feed to the post office from under the station.

Still, all these tracks were active station tracks for the railroads using CUS.  There'd be little room to bring storage cars in from the other stations, load 'em up and move 'em out. 

Operationally, it would've still been pretty awkward to bring cars in from the other three stations.  Plus, you're tying up locomotives, engineers, firemen and switchmen and the charges incurred for moving empties and loads back and forth.

Far cheaper and efficient for the postal service to service the outlying stations with trucks.  (We're talkin' back in the day here, folks...)

Seems how the Chicago Post Office operations tied in with CUS and the other stations would make an interesting book.

Rusty

On the est side of CUS, there are two run trough platforms which connected the North and South fans.  RPO's could be tracked through there.

The PRR Panhandle trains did use the North side of CUS.  Actually, some MILK trains were signalled by position lights!