THE BRITISH RAILWAY MAIL SERVICE Letter Mails.—The first regular railway service to be estab lished was that between Manchester and Liverpool in 1830, and it was not long before it was recognized that this new means of locomotion would bring with it a revolution in the old methods of the conveyance of the mails. The post office authorities were not slow to recognize the necessity of obtaining adequate powers to secure the running of an efficient mail service, and the first Con veyance of Mails Act was passed in 1838. Under this act, the provisions of which still govern in essentials the relations between the post office and the railway companies, the postmaster general was given powers to call on the railway companies to convey his mails and guards in all trains, whether ordinary or special, and to provide if required the use of a whole carriage for the purpose of sorting letters. The only financial provision in the act was that the railway companies should receive "reasonable remunera tion" for their services, any negotiations which could not be settled amicably being referred to arbitration.
Even at this early stage it was seen that the value of the rail ways lay not only in their superior speed but in the facilities they afforded for doing in a swiftly moving railway carriage the work of sorting letters which would otherwise fall on a stationary office, and so of securing a very considerable advantage in time of delivery. The first travelling post office was established between Birmingham and Liverpool in 1838. It was 16' in length, 7' 6" in width, and the Railway Company protested that the run ning of so large and broad a vehicle would, owing to its wind resistance, delay their trains. Later in the same year another travelling post office was established between London and Preston, leaving Euston station at 8.3o P.M., a time which after 90 years is still maintained. The speeds on the earlier railways were com paratively slow. The journey from London to Birmingham occu pied 51 hours, and from London to Manchester or Liverpool 91.
These times were, however, less than half those occupied by the stage coaches, and the extension of the railways gradually drove the whole of the mail coaches off the road. The process was not a very rapid one as the last coach was not withdrawn until In spite, however, of the great improvements which they offered in the mail service the railways entailed a much heavier cost on the post office than their predecessors, and for some years after their establishment there was a constant series of disputes and difficulties between the companies and the post office on the question of payment.
At the outset the mails when not carried in a travelling post office were despatched by train exactly in the same way as by stage coach, that is, in charge of a post office guard. The system worked satisfactorily enough for the small mails of the 'thirties; but the great growth in the number of letters, which followed the introduction of penny postage soon made this method of trans mission inconvenient and unnecessarily costly, and in 1848 statu tory powers were obtained, under which the railway companies were obliged to convey mails by train in charge of their own guards, which is still the normal method of transmission for the great bulk of the mails sent by railway. During the next 5o or 6o years the post office was occupied in making the best use possible of the extension of the railway systems, and of the in crease in the speed and the frequency of their trains, the results appearing in a constant improvement in the rapidity of postal communications and in the number of despatches and deliveries. On the financial side the great increase in the volume of the mails was, as was only natural, reflected in a gradual reduction in the relative cost of conveyance. In 1850 the annual payment to the railway companies was approximately £230,000; in 1928 it was approximately £2,000,000; but great as this increase is it is very considerably less than the increase in the same period in the number of letters handled by the post office.