Let's See Your Railway Post Office Rpo Items

Very nice. The only school course I've failed in my life was geography. Makes sense since these are old family covers and we originally hail from Vermont.

I was going through my Germany duplicates, looking for items I may have overlooked in the past to add to my collection. I found this guy:



It's Germany Scott 66 with a Bahnpost postmark. Dresden-Kohlfurt-Breslau, train no. 438, cancelled on January 3, 1905 ("3/1 05"). A search using Google Earth shows Kohlfurt is now Wegliniec, and Breslau is now Wroclaw, both in Poland.


(National Geographic 1914 map of Europe)

Regards, Robert

Robert, a nice find from the duplicate pile! This is why I rarely part with anything with a legible cancel. As I learn more and more (as on this thread, with some of the foreign language TPO's), I can go back and dig up interesting things. Now I am going to have to revisit the Germany duplicate accumulation. :)

Prahanvaki:

Since most of us do not read Japanese, is there any particular thing you look for in the cancel that would stand out to at least bring out the fact it is a RPO (TPO) cancel? I finally have the date system figured out, now to work on the cancel information. Thanks!

Here a U. S. Route Agent postmarked cover for the Chesapeake & Ohio, Route 174, Route Agent, Williamson's-Ashland, routing through VA, WV and KY. Note that the stamp is canceled with a negitive E, indicating eastbound travel. It may seem familar, as I posted it back in Oct of last year.





The rest of my RPO postmarks are cropped scans showing just the stamp (if any) and the postmark, these are on postcards found in my two county Redwood logging collection. The first is a Eureka & Scotia RPO, TR2 and the rest are Willits & San Fran RPO TR1.

re: Willits & San Fran:
Nice to have both the Will"E"ts, typographic error version and the corrected Will"I"ts version.
There seem to be a lot of typesetting errors in RPO devices.

As there are the only stikes I have of the Willits & San Fran RPO, I wonder when they noticed and changed the "typo" The two Will E ts postmarks are Apr and May of 1911, would you know when that train became a RPO?

One of the items above is annotated by the owner, "Eureka & Scotia RR RPO." Just in case someone misinterprets the annotation, I believe that many US RPO CDS marks do not identify a railroad, but rather indicate the endpoints of the trip in which an RPO was present in the train and the item was canceled. In other words, there was no railroad known as the Eureka & Scotia. Instead, an RPO car was operated between Eureka and Scotia by a railroad such as the Northwestern Pacific or one of its predecessors and the mail piece was canceled somewhere between those cities. At Scotia, there would have been a change of RPO car, crew, or canceling device, or a combination of these. Similarly, "Willits & San Fran" denotes an RPO trip between those cities, on NWP or Southern Pacific depending on the timeframe.

The above mentioned annotation is my identification of the postmark, using the postmark measurement system developed by John H. Williams for his two volume book California Town Postmarks 1849-1935. You bring up a good point, I'll remove the RR.

spelling

I make out the postmark as 19550812.

I make out the train number as 5.

Q/ Corrections?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Hi all,
Some from Australia

Cheers
Ron

Nothing special, just a few I found from a collection of coils on cover.

I posted this material in the Indiana Postal History Society Facebook group a few months ago. The images are from Carl Reichenbach's belongings. He was a clerk in the Railway Mail Service (RMS) and was the father of my great aunt, Virginia (Reichenbach) Heiss. Before her death several years ago, Aunt Virginia gave me a handful of items relating to her father's job. In the mid-1920s, he was on the route between Indianapolis and Cincinnati. I believe he later worked on routes between Indianapolis and South Bend and between Indianapolis and Cleveland. He lived in Pendleton, Indiana, and commuted to Indianapolis to begin his routes.

The first three images are from the December 12, 1925, "Schedule of Mail Trains" for the Fifth Division. That division included the states of Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky. The next three images (plus a close-up of one page) are trip reports from Carl's "Memorandum of Trip Reports." The final image is a page from his Form 3844 book. This was an official hardbound book measuring 6½ inches by 8 inches and about ½ inch thick. It was assigned to Carl for his exclusive use. His first entry was March 23, 1925.

I don't know many of the details about the operation of the RMS. Maybe others can add some information to help explain what these reports represent.

Pendleton to Indianapolis was quite a commute in those days.

Somewhere in my family stuff, I have some similar items from my paternal grandfather. He worked as a mail & parcel clerk over 30 years for the Pennsylvania Railroad, based in Indianapolis, my home town.

I'm a Hoosier, and arrived in Indy in '73 after college.

Yes, that was a long commute and I failed, when I had the opportunity, to find out Carl did that. My guess is interurban. If so, he would have walked a few blocks from Market Street down to Union Station. In any case, he made that round trip for many years!

Tom