page_title: George Bangs
section_title: Rail mail
hierarchical_section_title: George Bangs / Rail mail
caption_attribution_description: English: A nightime scene of a US railroad junction, "Fast-mail" train in center
context_page_description: George Bangs was an American businessman who began his adult life working in private ventures including printing, shoes, farming and journalism before becoming postmaster of Aurora, Illinois in 1861. During his postal career, he worked with the Railway Mail Service. There he improved the mail sorting system on trains and was the most prominent advocate of "fast-mail" express mail trains. In 1871, as the RMS General Superintendent, he oversaw the start of the "fast-mail" service which began in 1875. The next year he resigned after Congress cut funding. He died in 1877 and was remembered with an elaborate grave marker denoting his contribution to the postal service.
context_section_description: The United States Post Office Department utilized trains from the 1830s. Mail was shipped to be delivered to towns along rail lines or forwarded on to other destinations. In the 1860s, mail for the Western United States was shipped by rail as far as St. Joseph, Missouri, and forwarded by stagecoach from there. The process was improved in 1862 when the first mail car was used to sort the mail on the train before it reached St. Joseph. In 1864 Armstrong, then the assistant postmaster in Chicago,  suggested widespread expansion of mail-sorting cars, leading to the development of the Railway Post Office car, first tested between Chicago and Clinton, Iowa, with the Chicago & Northwestern in August 1864.
  Bangs's first improvement to the RMS in 1869 was the addition of "serviceable lamps" used in mail cars that he had imported from Germany.
  In an 1874 report, Bangs advocated the creation of a mail train running between New York and Chicago, "designed to expedite the movement of mail from the east to the west and cover the distance in about twenty-four hours". His lobbying was successful and the RMS was expanded in 1875 with "fast-mail" trains, high-speed mail-only trains that had priority over all other rail traffic. Each train consisted of four mail cars and one coach. The first such routes were New York City to Chicago on the New York Central, and Philadelphia to Chicago on the Pennsylvania Railroad.  The inaugural "fast-mail" train left New York at 4 a.m. on September 16, 1875, and arrived over 900 mi (1,400 km) away at Chicago's Lake Shore station in a record-setting 26 hours. Guests on the train numbered more than 100, including various postal officials, Senator Carl Schurz, and Vice-President Henry Wilson.
  The New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroad fast-mail trains to Chicago were called the Twentieth Century Limited and Limited Mail, respectively.
  Bangs also directed the RMS to first sort mail only to the state level and forward it to the most distant railway post office in each state that could process it further. This distributed the sorting process and reduced backups. Under his tenure, the number of miles of railroad that was used to haul mail increased to 70,083.  Much mail continued to be carried by Railway Post Office cars on normal passenger trains.
  Even though the priority trains were very successful in improving mail operations, Congress discontinued funding eleven months after the initial run, causing Bangs to resign his position in 1876.
caption: A nighttime scene on a Currier & Ives postcard, c. 1876, of a US railroad junction, "Fast-mail" train in center
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