Railway Post Office RPO ended June 30 1977

I have been fascinated for many years by RPO history.  For a number of years I belonged to the Mobile Post Office Society which deals in the history of the railway mail service and the highway mail service.  I also collected RPO postmark mail for several years - trains and trucks.  After a while I  became less interested in those things but still have a lot of RPO memorabilia.

The railway mail service began in 1834 in a small way.  It replaced stage coaches and pony express.  Among the many old books I collected is a 1903 History of the Railway Mail Service.  It has some interesting data on the early days of the RPO as well as information on the daily life of a railway mail clerk.

Above is a 1909 postcard view of the interior of an RPO car.  The purpose of these cars was to take a load of mail for their rail route and sort the mail enroute for delivery to stations along the rail route.  RPO clerks had to memorize all of the stations on the route and be able to toss each piece of mail into the correct mail bag as the RPO car lurched along the rails.  The bags would then be tossed out at the correct station and a new bag of mail would be grabbed from a trackside mail crane as the train passed the station.

Above is a 1940's RPO car interior.

Above is a collage of RPO marks on letters and postcards from my collection.

There were hundreds of RPO routes around the country.  Most RPO marks had the routes abbreviated so you usually need a route listing to identify the route.

Many years ago I worked with a man who had worked on the Washington DC to New York RPO route before it was shut down in 1977.  That was the last operational route.  He had some interesting stories.