By Nicola Dwornik
We take a visit to London’s Mail Rail Museum and discover the underground tunnels which used to deliver post around the city…
** Check out our Instagram story here**
Victorian fan flirtations…
The 21st Century has brought us some marvellous discoveries: Wikipedia, air-blade hand dryers, fifty-two new moons of Jupiter, contactless payment cards. It has also given us the sterile unmatched convenience of instant messaging.
It’s a shame really.
Our predecessors, by default, had to use far more creative methods of communication. The Victorians, for example, used ‘fan flirtations’ to deliver messages as diverse as ‘You are cruel’ (open and shut fan rapidly) and ‘I wish to get rid of you’ (twirl fan in left hand).* The Ancient Greeks tattooed secret messages onto the scalps of their slaves, letting the hair grow back before sending them on their way. The recipient would proceed to give the slave messenger a fresh trim, thus revealing the message.
Growing hair is a long process. Slavery is also unethical. More people learned to write and decided to send letters.
By the 20th Century, Britain’s postal service was at its peak. Thousands of messages were being sent and received sent every day, yet London’s streets were so rammed with traffic that the postal service struggled to keep up with deliveries. The solution to this problem was simple: go underground.
Thus, MAIL RAIL was born.
*A full list of phrases in Victorian fan language is available here for download.
A tube line for post…
MAIL RAIL (or ‘The Post Office Railway’ as it was known as until 1987) was the name of the underground railroad system which rapidly transported letters and parcels beneath London’s streets.
Built in 1927, Mail Rail originally ran from Paddington in the west to Whitechapel in the east, moving items between various sorting offices. The carriages were much smaller than the ones we sit in on the tube and ran through 9ft wide tunnels. Even after the introduction of computer control, postal workers chose to dispatch each train personally for safety.
A map of the original network can be seen below:
The network ran until 2003—when the functionality of 2000 unread emails rendered the system inefficient.
Do not weep, however, my dear #curious commuters. The system has been immortalised at London’s Postal Museum. Here you can pretend to be a parcel and ride the underground tracks.
£8 for a leg, £4 for an eye…
London’s Postal Museum is a great spot for the curious commuter. As someone who wants to get married in a transport museum, preferably to a train, it was a great day out.
The first part of my day involved walking around a museum dedicated to telling the history of Britain’s postal service. This experience was far from dull.
I read about a lion attacking a Pomegranate:
I learned that limbs cost £8 but organs are cheaper:
- Sailing ships which carried mail from Britain to her overseas outposts in the 19th Century were called ‘packets’. They frequently carried military orders and battle plans and were attacked so often by pirates and enemy nations that there was a generous compensation scheme for the death/injury of sailors:
£8 for a sailor’s arm or leg, £4 for an eye.
I realised that people from the countryside can be difficult:
I found out that 50-100ft icebergs don’t stop postal workers:
- RMS Titanic had over 3,000 mail sacks on board when it struck the iceberg. When postal workers realised the mail room was flooding, they started moving the mail to the upper decks. A steward recalled: “I urged them to leave. They shook their heads and continued at their work. It might have been an inrush of water later that cut off their escape, or it may have been the explosion. I saw them no more.”
I even viewed a gallery of post office cats, who were officially appointed to catch rodents and had salaries:
- The most famous postal cat of all was Tibs, who was born in November 1950. He weighed a massive 23lbs and lived in the Headquarters’ refreshment club in the basement of the Money Order Office London. He worked diligently for 14 years to keep the building mouse-free.
Then I trekked across the street to ride the Rail Mail.
Projections of wartime love…
Riding the Mail Rail was a surreal experience. I went underground. I went back in time. I survived the blitz and got a letter sent to my wartime lover I never knew I had pledged my fidelity to seventy-years ago.
Such is the magic of the MAIL RAIL audio-visual-experience™ captured here on our Instagram.
With a Mail Rail ticket you can ride part of the underground track as if you were a parcel. The carriage halts at various platforms and projections onto the sides of the tunnels illustrate how the system operated throughout the years even, and especially, during wartime.
At the peak of its service, Mail Rail helped to deliver four million letters a day.
When you resurface, there is a short exhibition about the history of the service and the strange things Mail Rail helped to deliver:
James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in 1920, was banned in the UK as obscene and could not be legally delivered in the mail. Mail Rail workers intercepted dozens of copies which were then destroyed under the Customs Consolidation Act of 1876.
There is also the story of how, after its closure in 2003, Mail Rail featured in the Bruce Willis film ‘Hudson Hawk’. In the film his character tries to break into the Vatican using a fictional underground railway beneath the city.
And, after all that fun, it was time to leave.
I was done being #curious and in need of some tea.
Until next time, commuters.
You too can experience the Postal Museum and Mail Rail experience for £17.05 (adult) or £10.45 (child). If you’re a student a ticket costs £15.45, or £6.25 if you’re a National Art Pass Member. This post is sponsored purely by my love for transport.
The Curious Commuter 