Rural Routes During WW2 - Question

I live in the UK where, in this small and very crowded land, we do not have rural routes.

I asume they are a collection of houses or farmswhich were well separated from each other but that may be wrong.

I am wondering how the system worked. For example on this cover below only the recipients name is given and RR No. 2.

Would the postman be expected to know all the people on his route by name or was there one or more central post boxes where incoming mail was placed to be collect by the addressee at some time in the future.

That makes me wonder how long these routes were and if there were many of them.

Can someone please help a confused "Brit"



AQ

Holmes covers early postal movements from 726 BC
to the publication in 1943.
Sadly he fails to address Rural Deliveries from my cursory look

You may wish to read this link.
https://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/ex...h1908ae.html




I think both are true, however South Durham, I would expect the carrier would know all residents.

I do not know the Canada RFD answer, but in the US, yes, the rural routes covered roads outside the city delivery limits and served up to several hundred boxes, which were erected singly or in small groups depending on the route's path. The base carrier compensation in 1940 was based on a 30-mile route. with adjustments made for longer or shorter routes.
The U.S. carriers tracked their patrons. Here is section 992 of the 1940 Postal Laws and Regulations:

I suspect the Canadian regulations were not very different.

These did exist, but not in the context of your cover, date wise.

Reference : Cover Notations "Way Letter", "Way" "Bye" "Twopenny Houses"

Bib : Holmes 1943 Page 38 (L. Seale Holmes, M.D.)

Thank you for the info.

So with the above cover the postman would know where Gordon Smith lived. I wonder what happened if the postman was ill or went on holiday.

AQ

I may not be understanding this question properly so please disregard this post if that is the case.
My Grandfather was post master in a small village of approx. 125 people during the war.
He owned the general store in the village which was also the post office for the village and all the farms in and around the village.
The village people picked up their mail at the general store but the people who lived outside the village would have their mail delivered to their home.
Each rural home or farmhouse would have a mailbox erected at the end of their driveway on the mailbox was also their name.
So with this in mind all anyone would have to know is the route and they would stop at each mailbox on the route and put the corresponding mail in that mailbox.
I accompanied the postmaster on his rural delivery route many times not during the war years but in the late 50's and early 60's and it was the same system at that time.
As a side note many of the general stores also sold newspapers, the larger newspapers (Toronto Star, Toronto Telegram) would be delivered to the general store to be picked up by the subscriber.
Most of the rural subscribers would have their papers delivered with their mail even though it never went through the mail. (possibly some double dipping here).
The smaller newspapers did not have the infrastructure to deliver there product to the store so they were sent via regular mail.
I hope I've understood the OP question correctly, if not I apologize.

Cheers, Bill

I'm originally from a rural area in Iowa that used to use the Rural Route system and I can confirm that the mail carriers generally knew where addressees lived. The town I grew up in had a population of about 300 living in the town itself with maybe another 1.5x that amount living on surrounding farms and having a town (rural route) address. Generally - and this is not an exaggeration - everybody knew where everybody lived, including who lived on most of the farms. There wasn't much special knowledge required as the post office could have hired just about anyone from the local area and they'd have known where to deliver the mail.

About 30 years ago, they ditched the rural route system and every farm and acreage has an actual street address now. This was mostly done for emergency response - if someone had a medical emergency or fire, etc, they could give an actual address to a dispatcher rather than just saying "2 miles west of highway 10 at mile 34" or something along those lines. Local postmen might have known where everyone lived, but emergency response might be coming from a different town and they would have no idea where the home of John Smith, RR2 was located.

With the suggestion above, Farmers / sailors should have iphone with
sat nav or epirb or "what 3 words" app.

Every 9 square meter plots in the entire globe
(example in Australia, you get trapped in an overturned tractor on a wheatbelt property)

Spare a thought for the Mongolian postie. As if dust storms, rabid dogs and the problems of delivering mail to the quarter of the population that is nomadic aren't enough, next month the nation of 27 million will be the first to completely overhaul its postal system.

Street numbers are out – frankly, even in the capital of Ulaanbaatar they were never really in – and instead every nine square metres of land will be identified by a unique three-word phrase. That's a distinct name for every patch of Mongolian soil around the size of a yurt.

Example : My Hardware store is at ///pronouns.swab.reels

Using that app one could have found a friend immediately at Woodstock.

South Durham Quebec is at ///tone.recoup.airship

Santa's Workshop is at ///grinning.windmill.notify

Custer's Last Stand ///peanuts.napkins.regime

In France a rural postman ,circa 1830-1860 for example;at the time of his retirement walked an average of 25kms a day.In his lifetime of work ;walked a distance of over 260.000kms,that's 6 times around the earth.

In 2008, Mike Street wrote an interesting article 100th anniversary of first rural mail delivery in Canada.. which was published in BNA Topics, Vol. 65 No. 4. The article is available, along with the entire run of the journal on the BNAPS website. An authoritative text is Canada Post's 1975 book, History of Rural Mail in Canada . .

I grew up on RR #1 in Kelowna, BC. We would have post delivery 6 days a week. We had a mail box at the end of our driveway with our name on it and the driver would use that to know where to put the mail. We lived on an orchard as did most of our neighbours. There was a group of a dozen or so houses across the road and there was a 'group lockbox' for them.

The following showed up in my mail box from a non-collector friend. While not exactly related to the current topic, I thought it might fit better here than in a new thread.

The mail must go through



Caption:



Source: https://www.facebook.com/www.provin...esofalberta/

Mike