The Bay State Monthly — Volume 1, No. 1, January, 1884Various
History
The Bay State Monthly — Volume 1, No. 1, January, 1884
Various
Massachusetts -- Periodicals; New England -- Periodicals
The instant the train stops, a portion of the mail, large or small as
the case may be, is delivered into a wagon for rapid transfer to a
railway post-office train about to start from another station. If the
incoming train is late, it may be necessary to exact the utmost speed to
reach the outgoing train, and in many cases it is always necessary to
effect it rapidly. After the transfer mail is disposed of, the labels of
the remaining pouches and sacks are examined, and as the mail is passed
out of the car we are surprised at its quantity, filling a number of
large wagons; this, however, does not constitute the entire mail
distributed _en route_, as the quantities delivered at junctions
and stations aggregate, in many cases, more by far than that delivered
at the terminal station, There are many details of work that our space
forbids us to describe, that are technical and of little interest to the
reader, but are of relative importance. These we must leave, and prepare
for the return journey on the night-train, feeling grateful that our
busy fellow-travelers are to have an opportunity to refresh themselves.
The work performed in a railway post-office on a night-train differs
somewhat from that on a day-train, yet maintaining the same general
principle of distribution. The methods differ, governed by the
connections, and a clerk suddenly transferred from a day-train to a
night-train on the same route, unless thoroughly informed of the train
schedules, of close and remote connections, the time of the dispatch of
direct closed pouches from many post-offices, stage route schedules,
etc.,--which knowledge, even approximating correctness, would be
extraordinary,--would be almost as much at a loss as if transferred to
another route, excepting his knowledge of the location of the
post-offices on his own line. In all cases if a delay occurs, causing a
connection to be missed, it is the duty of the clerk to know at once the
next most expeditious route by which the mail can be forwarded.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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