Railway Post Offices (R.p.o.) In Canada

I related a story in another thread a while back having to do with my uncle's rural postal route in southwestern Ontario. Horse and buggy in the summer, cutter (sleigh) in the winter. He told me once that from the barn to the midpoint of the route the horse dragged its feet but from there back to the barn he could hardly hold the horse back.

I grew up in the small village of Teeswater in southwestern Ontario, which was the western terminus of what was in the end Canadian Pacific Railway's Teeswater-Orangeville branch line. At Orangeville it met the Owen Sound mainline train making its downhill run into Toronto.

My early postal memories are the horse and wagon leaving our local post office (Mr. Donahue was the postmaster for years) to rush to the station where the mail bags would be thrown on to the waiting combination mail/baggage car just before the huffing and puffing steam engine pulled away from the station. I was lucky enough to ride in that car once. I also got to ride in the caboose once as far as Wingham, which was the first stop. Sadly the route disappeared many years ago but is still visible on google maps and google earth's satellite photos.

I highly recommend two books, namely Magnetic North: Canadian Steam in Twilight and Steam Trains to the Bruce for anyone interested in the train history of the area. Also, the following link takes anyone interested to a great story describing one night in the mail car on the Toronto-Montreal run (hopefully the link will work)

http://bnatopics.org/hhlibrary/news...n05-w061.pdf

Great story, Cynical.

It's funny the things one remembers and the small things that shape one's life years afterwards.

Kirk

Cynical, Thanks for sharing the personal account and the link. The RPO was really essential in moving mail the vast distances throught Canada and the U.S. Many people think of the RPO as a mail transport system but it was a actual full postal station on rails.


1905 RPO interior


1920 slightly more cluttered view

My only example,
1943 "folkard" letter card,
cancelled (under magnification)
as "CAMP & LEVIS RPO"

Sundry Information, that may be of interest:

The Canadian Railway Mail Service


CPR #3704 Baggage/Mail Car Restored

The West Coast Railway Association in British Columbia
(current home of the famous Royal Hudson steam train)
is the custodian of Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR)
Baggage / Mail Car #3704.

CPR Baggage / Mail Car No. 3704 was part of a group
of 10 cars rebuilt from standard Baggage / Mail cars
in the 3600 series.

It has 50' baggage compartment and a 30' mail compartment.

The CP #3704 Baggage/Mail car built by Canadian Car
and Foundry in 1949. (My dad worked there during WW2.)
The car was born as CP#3635 and was then renumbered as
CP #3704. Later it became RBCM (Royal BC Museum) #3704
but is now being restored as CP #3704.

BC Rail bought the car from CPR for work train service
but never converted it. In 1988 the car was acquired
for preservation by the West Coast Railway Association.

The Mail section is largely intact and it is proposed
to use the rest of the car (baggage section) to house
interpretative displays and exhibits describing
the history of the Railway Postal Service.

This type of combination Baggage and Mail car was
quite unusual and they were designed for use on
branch lines where the volume of mail was not
sufficient to warrant a full Railway Post Office car.


Railway Post Offices

Mail began to be sorted on trains in the late
19th century when the railways had developed
an extensive passenger network.

The Railway Mail Service was the elite branch
of the Post Office. It took intelligence, manual
dexterity, strength, endurance and an excellent
memory to qualify as a Railway Mail Clerk.

An annual event was the Case Examination in
which the clerk had to sort 1000 cards with
the Post Office name on them into the slot
corresponding with their correct distribution
point. The time limit was 1 hour and an accuracy
rate of less than 90% meant no salary increase.
Repeated failure led to dismissal.

The Railway Mail Service died with the removal
of the passenger trains. Mail, once sorted on
the trains, had to be brought into Post Offices
to be processed. It was many years before postal
service regained the standards it had once enjoyed
in the days of the Railway Mail Service.

The Canadian Railway Mail Service officially ended
April 24, 1971 with the last R.P.O. ending its run
by returning from Campbellton, New Brunswick to Levis, Quebec

Special commemorative cover last RPO run Montreal to Toronto
April 24, 1971. One of five last runs on that date.
http://www.trainweb.org/oldtimetrai...aymail_6.jpg


For a full account of the Canadian Railway Mail Service,
you may wish to read "On Track" by Susan O'Reilly.


Covers

Earlier this year an interesting cover came up for sale on eBay.
The cover was registered on September 17, 1954 in Graz 10, Austria,
and reached Montreal, Canada, on September 19. The cover was sent by
Dr. Beeth. H. Flesch of Graz, Austria, to Armand Picard of St. Aubert,
County L'Islet, Canada.

On the front, it had been franked with 7 stamps, Scott #591, 594,
595, 521, 527, 545 and 550. On the back, the sender added some
regular stamps: Scott #546 (3x) and 543. There are 4 Austrian
postmarks on front and all are readable. On the back, there are
2 more readable Graz 10 cancels and 3 Canadian cancels:
Montreal Canada Registered, Levis & Montreal R.P.O (blurred) and
Campbellton & Levis Express RPO (almost unreadable), dated
Sept. 19 or 20, 1954.


Another interesting cover:

4c + 5c + 8c King George VI
registered - Halifax , Nova Scotia - May 10 1937 -
Back stamped with:
(a) Levis & Camp'b'ton EXP RPO [#Q38 Rarity Factor 40 ] ,
(b) Levis & Montreal RPO [#Q43 Rarity Factor 10 ] , and
(c) Halifax & Camp(bellton) RPO [#MA 80 Rarity Factor 35] -

The 17c overpays the registered Empire rate to Jamaica -
Note: Halifax flag cancel for 1937 Coronation
http://www.donslau.com/713muftifdc.jpg

Acknowledgement blair rcsd

Kirk: thanks; and thank you for your KGV presentation. It changed my whole outlook on the royal definitives.

Russ: thanks for including the picture. It's a fantastic improvement on the photocopied one in the article.

Rod: great stuff - read through it all while I was having my morning coffee.

For those interested in the abbreviated railway line designations here is another link

http://bnatopics.org/hhlibrary/news...n01-w051.pdf

Hi All

I am glad that Cynical started such an interesting thread. One of my collecting interests is Canadian R.P.O. cancellations.

The cancel that Rod scanned for us, the "Camp & Levis" RPO, is either a Type 17 or Type 17H. It is too bad that the cancellation does not show up better. If it is Type 17, then it was in use from 1927 to 1970 and if it is a Type 17H, then it was in use from 1948 to 1969. Neither type is scarce but still an interssting RPO anyway. There were also "Camp & Levis Express" and "Camp & Levis Local" RPOs as well. Again they are not scarce but if they have a clerk's name in the cancelling device, then they are quite a bit more expensive.

Nice thread

Chimo

Bujutsu

The lettercard is dated 1943, so it must be type 17 bujutsu,
I googled youtube for CPR railways whilst reading this thread,
and suddenly realised I had lost an hour or so
daydreaming.
You certainly have a beautiful country.

Excellent thread here!

Thank you Rod

I think Canada is great too and I too have noticed beutiful spots around the world as well.

BTW Rod, I have seen Aussie programs such as "Water Rats", and now one with the RAN called "Sea Patrol" plus others, but their names have escaped me for the moment.

I know a chap that was once a mail handler on board one of the train and his name was also incorporated into one of the hammers. His name is Mike Millar and I still see him about one or two times a year.

In all, these RPOs are sure interesting.

All the best

Chimo

Bujutsu

An aside to the RPO theme: I lecture most mornings at my A&W coffee group. This morning when I arrived the artist in the group wise-cracked that "the chair recognizes the honourable member from Teeswater-Wingham" and I related the story to them about my fond memory of the horse & wagon racing to the station to deposit the mail bags in the mail car.

Well, wouldn't you know it - my buddy on my left related that his former business partner (whom he had brought in for us all to meet a few months previous) had started out sorting mail in mail cars. When they began phasing them out he decided to look into another career.

My reason for telling this has to do with the coincidence of it all, namely, doesn't it just go to show how these things pop up. Like when was the last time you met a whipple-tree maker or even a maker of buggy whips.

Here's something that may be of peripheral interest to you, Rodney. I subscribe to a mailing list for the National Film Board of Canada, and I get a weekly newsletter containing info on various NFB films that are online - they're in the process of digitizing it all and putting it all online (hooray for an effective public sector!). One of the recent newsletters contained links to these two films featuring Buster Keaton, a committed fan of the railroads.

http://www.nfb.ca/film/railrodder/

http://www.nfb.ca/film/buster_keaton_rides_again

There are a great many NFB films which can be linked directly to Canadian stamp issues. Here's one of my favourites. (No railroad content, just owl content.)

http://www.nfb.ca/film/eskimo-artist-kenojuak/

Ryan

Rod: your link to trainweb.com above is broken. Your post mentions "Canadian Car and Foundry". There were a couple of these plants scattered across Canada and one was in Fort William (now Thunder Bay) where they still make railway, subway and street cars that are shipped all over the world. This "Cancar" plant is perhaps best known for its war years when Hurricanes were built for the war effort. The National Film Board of Canada produced an excellent documentary of those years entitled "Rosies of the North" in reference to the women who worked there. Here is a link:

http://www.nfb.ca/playlists/ww2/vie...f_the_north/

An interesting aside to this story, in my view, is the role that women played in flying all the planes built in North American over the Atlantic. Literally thousands of planes funnelled through Newfoundland (Gander) and Labrador (Goose Bay) before making the leap over the water.

Fantastic links Ryan
I notice London Bus pokes his nose in several times,
and Buster has solved the stamp storage problem...
a bottomless toolbox!
1965 and looks like it was filmed yesterday.

Cynical: it no doubt has broken links
the commentary was originally posted years ago,
my bad, I should advise with caveat.

Some more interesting tidbits about the R.P.O. system can be found here:

http://www.wep.ca/stamps/rpo_history.htm

I posted this on another thread related to interesting cancels but it is more appropriate here as it pertains directly to R.P.O (T.P.O) operations:

http://www.wep.ca/stamps/unusual/unusual.htm