GWR Route: Banbury to Wolverhampton

GWR Route: North Warwickshire Line

Birmingham Snow Hill Station: gwrbsh1162

A 1950 night view of Platform 7 after the crowds have gone whilst station staff prepare the mail bags for forwarding by the next postal service. The Travelling Post Office (TPO) has its origins way back in those leisurely days of horse drawn transport when elegant Royal Mail coaching services along the turnpikes and lanes of the land conveyed mail. During the period of 1830 to 1840 the price of a letter was calculated by its weight, content and distance carried. Postage due was collected from the recipient of the letter and not by the sender. All of this was a very different system to that with which we are so familiar today. Once it was established that the steam locomotive could run for long distances along these iron rails, companies were established, to lay lengths of track from town to town throughout the country.

Initially, a successful railway was operated between Liverpool and Manchester and although passenger carrying was its principal aim, the Post Office recognised an opportunity for transportation of mail - a vast improvement on its road services between those two places. The mail could now be conveyed to one of the new railway stations from which it could be loaded into a train and sent on to various destinations along the line. However, this was not to be enough, so great was the influx of mail into the sorting offices that more revolutionary strategies had to be employed. This brought the minds of those Victorian Post Office innovators to bear on the question of how to deal with the increasing flow of traffic.

Their solution to the problem was to get it out of the sorting offices as quickly as possible, and on to a Travelling Post Office (TPO) in an unsorted state. It is worth noting that the first experiments with TPO's took place in January 1838, almost two years before the introduction of the uniform penny post! Rowland Hill and his associates were able to anticipate the problems that lay ahead. These new TPO's, also called Railway Post Offices or Moving Post Offices became the key to the success of the uniform penny post. It was the Internet of the 1840s. As the railway systems grew so the road coaches diminished and the use of TPO's and Sorting Carriages (SC) became more evident across the network. With London being the principal city as well as being the largest it had always been the hub of all postal activities.

The railways too, soon found their way to London and radiated out from the capital roughly following the old major coaching routes. Lines to Dover, Plymouth, Penzance, Bristol, Cardiff, Holyhead, Birmingham, Crewe, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Sheffield, Derby, York and Norwich, were all accessible from London. The various TPO's and SC's adopted names suited to their location and lines of railway companies over which they travelled. The 'North Eastern', 'North Western', 'Great Western', 'South Eastern', 'Great Northern', 'Caledonian' and 'East Anglian' were all names used over the years at various times and gave some indication of the routes they travelled. District Sorting Carriages tended to be named after the places from which they were staffed and ran from/to. Typical were the Glasgow, Edinburgh, Ipswich and Cambridge SC's.

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