Mail and rail don’t just rhyme. They are symbiotic. Letters and parcels have been carried by train almost since the inception of the Iron Road. Now, just as celebrations will be held for the 200th anniversary of the Stockton & Darlington, the first passenger railway, the mail trains will be shunted forever into a siding. Or perhaps not.
The days of W.H. Auden’s Night Mail, the travelling post office featured in his classic short film of that name ‘bringing the cheque and the postal order’ and mail ‘for the rich and poor’ were already long gone and the trains now being scrapped by the Royal Mail are in effect just specialised goods trains painted red rather than the Travelling Post Office he describes. But mail has still been carried overnight by relatively modern electric trains speeding up and down the West and East Coast Main Line.
Their impending demise signifies the end of an era. The first carriage of mail by rail took place just a few weeks after the opening in 1830 of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, a much more sophisticated and technologically developed line than the Stockton & Darlington, which had signed a contract with the General Post Office. It was an obvious move since trains were so much quicker than the alternatives of cart or canal. Other railways spreading quickly around the country followed suit and the arrangement was soon formalised in the shape of legislation, the precisely named Railways (Conveyance of Mails) Act in 1838, which placed an obligation to take mail if the government’s Postmaster General required them to do so. By 1842, no fewer than 40 companies were carrying mail around much of the country on 1,400 miles of tracks.
Initially the mailbags were simply hauled by the railways but then to further speed up services, the Post Office began sorting the mail while on the move in what were then known as Railway Post Offices, only much later in the 1920s assuming the present term of Travelling Post Offices. It is difficult today to understand the extent to which TPOs were used. At their peak just before the First World War there were 126 rattling round the country, each with a team of sorters picking letters out of mailbags and placing them in shelving which seemed to have an infinite number of compartments. There was, too, the excitement of picking up extra bags from specially created hooks above the platforms and dumping others from open carriage doors while the trains remained at full speed. No fragile objects, thank you. But there was cash, as revealed by the TPO’s most famous – or rather infamous – moment, the Great Train Robbery of 1963 when there were still roughly 50 operating across the rail network. The overnight Glasgow to London train was held up by a red signal triggered by the team of robbers, who targeted a carriage carrying ‘high value packages’ and got away with an estimated £2.5m to £3m (equivalent to ten times that sum today). The thieves were eventually tracked down but most of the money was never recovered.
After privatisation in the mid 1990s, the use of Travelling Post Offices reduced rapidly as road transport took over but in a last bid to save the operation, a fleet of 16 electric trains designed to run at night but without any sorting taking place on board was introduced just before the break-up of British Rail. It is these trains which have now reached what Royal Mail considers the end of their working life and will not be replaced.
In July, the Royal Mail announced the decision to end the carriage of mail this autumn, claiming that the trains, which it owns, were a approaching the end of their lives and were not worth replacing. However. the Royal Mail is up for sale and while it may not match the Post Office in deviousness, getting the liability of the need to replace these trains off the balance sheet is expected to help attract prospective suitors. Indeed one railway manager suggested: ‘They could easily have found other solutions such as leasing trains or refurbishing the existing ones which would be able to last another decade. They knew this was coming for several years but made no effort to prepare for it. They just see rail as a hassle.’
While the Royal Mail is claiming that the solution of replacing trains with trucks will be carbon neutral, this is only because the company has also promised to halve the number of daily flights to 18, again transferring these to road. Rather confusingly, the Royal Mail also said it was the high electricity prices for its trains which contributed to the decision to end mail trains but given the war in the Middle East fuel prices remain uncertain too.
There have been discussions within the rail industry to try to salvage the service. John Smith, the boss of GB Railfreight, which rescued the service in 2004 after Royal Mail suspended operations, said: ‘We’ve been through the figures and have discussed options’ but the company has subsequently decided not to go ahead.
Just possibly all is not lost. Maggie Simpson, director general of the Rail Freight Group, the umbrella organisation for the industry, reckons several companies may be interested in carrying mail: ‘I am optimistic that some of this traffic will eventually find its way back. Rail has so many advantages, notably environmental and speed, that logically it should work.’ She points to the fact that the remaining rail service carries only first- and second-class letters when the big and growing market is the transport of parcels. Moreover, the Royal Mail has been left with major depots at places such as Willesden in north-west London and Daventry in the Midlands which remain ready to use.
There is too a wider political point. Royal Mail argued that part of the reason for the abandonment of mail rail was uncertainty over the future support available from government. Now there is pressure on the new government to demonstrate its green credentials given that the loss of the mail trains is a political embarrassment. It seems rather emblematic of the Broken Britain narrative which Labour is anxious to dispel, though in fairness even the French gave up running postal trains on their high speed network after 30 years in 2016 because of falling demand. Carrying freight by rail is enormously popular with the public who are always keen to see fewer lorries on the road and therefore the government would win brownie points by providing subsidies for companies seeking to use rail instead.
Given the rapid and continuing decline in the number of letters posted each year, parcels represent the best hope for a renewed overnight mail on rail service. However, trying to persuade the big players who distribute millions of parcels annually such as FedEx or Amazon to use rail is an uphill task given that their distribution centres tend not to be near a railhead. One small light on the horizon is Varamis Rail, which is already operating a single daily service every weekday in each direction between Glasgow and Birmingham. In terms of timing, the service is competitive as the journey takes just four hours, faster than road.
So rail mail of sorts may live on but those wonderful travelling post offices with dozens of staff stumbling around long corridors on rattling trains sorting the mail will never return, something which W.H. Auden who died in 1973 surely never envisaged.