(Reuters circulated the following story on January 9.)
LONDON — Almost 170 years of railway and postal history will draw to a close early on Saturday morning as the last mail train pulls into Penzance station, the Royal Mail says.
The last Travelling Post Office, on which mail workers would sort up to 3,000 letters an hour as the train raced across the country, would arrive around 6:30 a.m., a spokeswoman said.
“For the people on the trains it really was a way of life,” she told Reuters. “Some of them had been on the trains for 30 years. It’s the end of an era.”
All staff on the trains had been offered a transfer to other jobs by the Royal Mail, but 80 percent had opted for voluntary redundancy, she said. Modern machines could sort mail 10 times faster than they could, she said.
The first travelling post office, a converted horse box, ran on 20 January 1838. The service was immortalised by W.H. Auden’s poem “Night Mail”, used in the film of the same name in 1936.
“This is the night mail, crossing the border/Bringing the cheque and the postal order/Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,/The shop at the corner and the girl next door,” it ran.
In 1963, mail trains entered legend again as the Glasgow to London mail train was held up and 2.6 million pounds stolen in what became known as the Great Train Robbery.
Some mail would continue to be carried by train until the contract with the train company expired at the end of the year, a spokeswoman said, but most would be carried by road or air.
The National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers said that ending mail trains went against the government’s declared policy of shifting freight from road to rail.
“Today we see a government-owned company shifting mail from environmentally friendly railways in favour of thousands of extra lorries that will clog already congested roads and pump tons more pollutants into the atmosphere,” union general secretary Bob Crow said.