page_title: Railway post office
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Railway post office / History
caption_attribution_description: English: The first RPO (1862) on a picture post card (ppc) published for the 1933 "Century of Progress" Exposition at Chicago, IL, (with Aug. 25, 1933 RPO Exhibit CDS) The Cooper Collection of U.S. Railroad History (Private Collection)
context_page_description: In the United States, a railway post office, commonly abbreviated as RPO, was a railroad car that was normally operated in passenger service as a means to sort mail en route, in order to speed delivery. The RPO was staffed by highly trained Railway Mail Service postal clerks, and was off-limits to the passengers on the train. In the UK and Ireland, the equivalent term was Travelling Post Office.
  From the middle of the 19th century, many American railroads earned substantial revenues through contracts with the U.S. Post Office Department to carry mail aboard high-speed passenger trains; and the Railway Mail Service enforced various standardized designs on RPOs. In fact, a number of companies maintained passenger routes where the financial losses from moving people were more than offset by transporting the mail.
context_section_description: The world's first official carriage of mail by rail was by the United Kingdom's General Post Office in November 1830, using adapted railway carriages on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Sorting of mail en route first occurred in the United Kingdom with the introduction of the Travelling Post Office in 1838 on the Grand Junction Railway following the introduction of the Railways (Conveyance of Mails) Act 1838.
  In the United States, some references suggest that the first shipment of mail carried on a train (sorted at the endpoints and merely carried in a bag on the train with other baggage) occurred in 1831 on the South Carolina Rail Road.  Other sources state that the first official contract to regularly carry mail on a train was made with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in either 1834 or 1835.  The United States Congress officially designated all railroads as official postal routes on July 7, 1838. Similar services were introduced on Canadian railroads in 1859.
  The Railway post office was introduced in the United States on July 28, 1862, using converted baggage cars on the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad (which also delivered the first letter to the Pony Express).  Purpose-built Railway Post Office (RPO) cars entered service on this line a few weeks after the service was initiated.  Their purpose was to separate mail for connection with a westbound stagecoach departing soon after the train's arrival at St. Joseph.  This service lasted approximately one year. The first permanent Railway Post Office route was established on August 28, 1864, between Chicago, Illinois, and Clinton, Iowa.  This service is distinguished from the 1862 operation because mail was sorted to and received from each post office along the route, as well as major post offices beyond the route's end-points.
  George B. Armstrong, assistant postmaster at Chicago, originally came up with the idea of having mail processed and distributed while the mail was on board, en route in mail cars. With the assistance of Schuyler Colfax, Speaker of the House at the time, and A. N. Zevely, Third Assistant Postmaster General, he was duly authorized to test his ideas.
  In 1869, the Railway Mail Service (RMS), headed by George B. Armstrong, was officially inaugurated to handle the transportation and sorting of mail aboard trains.  Armstrong was promoted from a supervisory position in the Chicago post office following his experiments in 1864 with a converted route agent's car on runs between Chicago and Clinton, Iowa.
  RPO car interiors, which at first consisted of solid wood furniture and fixtures, would also soon be redesigned.  In 1879, an RMS employee named Charles R. Harrison developed a new set of fixtures that soon gained widespread use.  Harrison's design consisted of hinged, cast-iron fixtures that could be unfolded and set up in a number of configurations to hold mail pouches, racks and a sorting table as needed for specific routes.  The fixtures were also designed so they could be folded away completely to provide a wholly open space to carry general baggage and express shipments as needed by the railroads.  Harrison followed through with manufacturing his design at a factory he opened in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin in 1881.
  The July 1, 1862, Pacific Railroad Act signed by President Lincoln established government funding for the construction of a railroad from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean with the express idea of opening a main line mail route across the western frontier. The act was officially entitled "AN ACT to aid in the construction of a railroad and telegraph line from the Missouri river to the Pacific Ocean, and to secure to the government the use of the same for postal, military, and other purposes,"    The Act opened the door to government funded railroad mail routes across the American continent.
  By the 1880s, railway post office routes were operating on the vast majority of passenger trains in the United States. A complex network of interconnected routes allowed mail to be transported and delivered in a remarkably short time. As many as a do
caption: The first RPO (1862)
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