Seventy feet below the streets of London, a train roughly the size of a garden bench once zipped along at 40 miles per hour, completely empty except for the letters belonging to others. This was the Post Office Railway, renamed Mail Rail in 1987, a two-foot-gauge electric route extending 6.5 miles from Paddington in the west to Whitechapel in the east. It featured eight stations, each concealed beneath a sorting office, none accessible to the public. Records maintained by The Postal Museum indicate that it opened on 5 December 1927, when the first parcels ran between Mount Pleasant and Paddington just in time for the Christmas rush. At its highest capacity, the line transported as many as four million letters daily. No traveler ever purchased a ticket.<\/p>\n
A concept that took seventy years to be realized<\/p>\n
The notion of an underground mail system was not a product of the 1920s. In 1855, Rowland Hill, who was then Secretary to the Post Office, presented the Postmaster General with a plan to propel letters through tunnels using air pressure, connecting headquarters to a building at Holborn. Engineers who evaluated the idea believed it could be implemented. However, accountants were not in agreement, and the proposal was abandoned.<\/p>\n
The enabling Bill was finally passed by Parliament in 1913, and as reported by Railway Technology, tunneling commenced in the following year. It was completed by 1917. After that, it lay dormant. The Treasury refused to allow the Post Office to acquire operating equipment during wartime, and the cost of materials in the post-war era kept the site inactive until 1923.<\/p>\n
The two years it served as an art vault<\/p>\n
An unfinished tunnel devoid of trains turned out to be an ideal bomb shelter for valuable antiquities. With Zeppelins and Gotha bombers posing a threat to London, the trustees of the British Museum decided in February 1918 to relocate their portable treasures into the incomplete postal railway. One of the stations happened to be located approximately 300 yards from the museum\u2019s entrance. In an article for The Art Newspaper, Martin Bailey enumerates the items that ultimately ended up stored on that platform: the Elgin frieze, the Rosetta Stone, 118,000 Babylonian and Assyrian tablets, and the museum\u2019s entire coin collection.<\/p>\n
Tunnel dampness is tolerable for stone but damaging for paper, prompting prints and drawings to be discreetly sent to the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth instead. About two years later, the Rosetta Stone returned to Bloomsbury. Some of the items that had been stored underground emerged in poor condition, leading to the British Museum establishing its first conservation laboratory for repairs.<\/p>\n
Twenty-two hours a day<\/p>\n
Operating the railway was less glamorous than the tunnels might imply. Approximately 220 personnel managed it, transporting sacks between wagons and platforms while the system functioned for 22 hours each day, reserving two hours for maintenance. Trains raced through the running tunnels and moved at about seven miles per hour across the platforms. Gradients aided in the process. Stations were positioned closer to the surface than the tracks connecting them, allowing a train to ascend onto a platform and gradually stop, then descend on the way out.<\/p>\n
Reliability was a separate concern. RailStaff notes that the original fleet of ninety units degraded the track so severely that the entire fleet needed replacement within three years.<\/p>\n
The cause of its closure<\/p>\n
Its demise was determined above ground. In 1995, a Royal Mail initiative known as Rail Net relocated mainline mail trains from central London termini like Paddington and Liverpool Street to a newly constructed hub at Willesden. Network Rail sought to reclaim the platform space for passenger services. The Postal Museum’s account reflects that as the moment the railway lost its justification for existence. Above-ground sorting offices had been closing or merging for years, and by 2003, only three out of the eight stations were still operational.<\/p>\n
Then came the calculations. Royal Mail, incurring losses exceeding a million pounds daily at the time, estimated underground operations to cost four to five times more than moving the same mail by road. David Chapman, Royal Mail\u2019s London project manager, informed reporters that the company \u201csimply cannot afford to continue operating an underground railway\u201d that no longer generated revenue.<\/p>\n
Little support existed outside the organization. Officials from the Communication Workers Union contended that the cost estimates were exaggerated and that the service had been intentionally deprived of traffic, operating at a fraction of its potential capacity to produce unfavorable numbers. Members of the London Assembly\u2019s public services committee urged Royal Mail and Transport for London to act swiftly to restore the line to profitability, suggesting new cargoes: cash, jewelry, and high-value items in general. Andrew Pelling, chairing the committee, even proposed wine. \u201cLondon is now more a city of drinkers than writers of letters,\u201d he remarked.<\/p>\n
Mail Rail transported its final loads in the early hours of 31 May 2003, seventy-five years and some change after those initial Christmas parcels.<\/p>\n
What exists there now<\/p>\n
The tunnels largely<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Seventy feet below the streets of London, a train roughly the size of a garden bench once zipped along at 40 miles per hour, completely empty except for the letters belonging to others. This was the Post Office Railway, renamed Mail Rail in 1987, a two-foot-gauge electric route extending 6.5 miles from Paddington in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":376164,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"Default","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[179],"class_list":["post-376163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-source-scienceblog-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=376163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376163\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/376164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=376163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=376163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=376163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}