End of era for overnight postal delivery
The last Travelling Post Office departed early this morning night from Stafford train station, ending an era of overnight postal delivery.
At 0121GMT the TPO rolled out of Stafford Station for the last time.
The “Night Mail” journey was made famous by the poetry of W H Auden and T S Eliot and the 1963 Great Train Robbery.
Royal Mail says ending the train service which sorts post en-route will save the firm GBP10 million a year.
A Royal Mail spokesman said yesterday: “Travelling sorting offices were a Victorian solution to a Victorian problem …, before the era of motorways and air travel. Like mail coaches before them, TPOs are now part of the Royal Mail’s history.”
Royal Mail says the service is now out of date, as machinery can handle 30,000 letters an hour, compared with just 3,000 on the trains.
The first journey by a TPO was in 1838 from London to the Midlands and more than 130 services were in service by the first decade of the twentieth century.
Royal Mail said the five hundred TPO workers would be redeployed to other parts of the firm or offered voluntary redundancy.
Steve Griffiths, a TPO unit manager, said a “big shock” awaited the men and women who had worked on the trains.
“It is much more than a job, it is a lifestyle.
“From Monday lunchtime until Saturday morning, their whole lives are organised for them, so for a lot of them it is going to be a big shock,” he said.
