The Post Office Railway
1927 · Driverless Underground Mail Railway · Work 734 of 1,871
A station of an underground postal railway of 1927 deep beneath a sorting office in London, a tube-shaped room lined with bolted cast-iron ring segments painted white, a narrow concrete platform beside two tracks of sixty-one centimetre gauge, at the platform a low driverless electric wagon of dark painted steel carrying four upright removable mail containers of sheet steel with rounded tops, filled with grey canvas sacks, two workers in waistcoats, rolled shirt sleeves and flat caps seen from behind pushing one wheeled container onto the wagon, pendant lamps with white opal glass globes along the curved ceiling, at the far end the black round mouth of the running tunnel.
- What it was used for
- A driverless narrow-gauge railway under London that carried mail only, linking sorting offices with the main-line stations. The contemporary account in Railway Wonders of the World gives 6.5 miles of length, a gauge of only 2 ft, 8 stations and a route some 80 ft below the streets; the railway "carries no passengers, is worked without drivers, conductors or signals". Average daily traffic required about 30,000 bags of mail to be handled. Building began in 1914, the war stopped the work, and the line was opened for traffic in December 1927. The same source puts the original cost at about one and a half million pounds.
- What was new
- What was new was doing without staff in the tunnel: no driver, no guard, no signals, on a 2 ft gauge; control lay, per the same account, with signalmen who energised the sections. The same account also describes the change of stock: the 90 original units had been withdrawn, and at the time of writing 50 vehicles ran, plus 3 battery locomotives for emergencies. The barb: the railway was built to escape street traffic and serve the terminus stations - and it died when the mail left those stations. According to the Postal Museum, Royal Mail's "Rail Net" of 1995 moved trunk traffic to a centre at Willesden; by 2003 the railway served only Mount Pleasant, Rathbone Place and Paddington, which was "not economically nor environmentally viable". The last mail trains ran on 31 May 2003.