It has already been shown that guards did very well indeed on the mainroad mails, and could very well have afforded to take the situation without any salary at all, or even, like waiters at modern restaurants, to pay for the privilege of receiving fees and tips. The salary was, in fact, merely a nominal retaining-fee, to give the Department a hold upon them. But there were a number of cross-country mails that were not nearly so profitable as those that ran direct from London, and it is to be feared that their guards did not always do so particularly well. Nor even did those on the great mail-coaches keep their handsome incomes at the last. Railways impoverished many a mail before they were finally withdrawn, and it was then that the guards agitated for higher salaries. Their perquisites had reached the vanishing-point, and at last the Post Office agreed to a new scale of pay. From 1842 the guards were to receive from £70 to £120 a year, according to length of service, but at the same time were forbidden to receive gratuities. This looks like a concession made by some malevolent humorist, for already most of the mails had been withdrawn. But mail-guards were, as a class, more fortunate than their brethren of the stage-coaches when railways ran them off the road. It is true that they keenly felt the loss of the great popularity they had enjoyed, and more keenly still did they miss the very handsome incomes they in many instances had made; but as officials directly employed by the Post Office, it was incumbent upon that Department to find them employ or to pension them. No such assured future could, or did, cheer the lot of the coachmen of the mails, or the coachmen or the guards of the stages. The mail-guards in many instances were drafted to the great railway stations, where they assisted in despatching the mails by railway. Most prominent among all whose career was thus diverted was Moses James Nobbs, who died in 1897, half a century after the road as an institution came to an end.