As General Barry wrote, the Baltimore & Ohio was spinning its extension lines from Baltimore to Washington, and he expressed an opinion that with that line a through mail service from New York to Washington might be accomplished in sixteen hours. That service is now made between those cities in five hours. General Barry's appeal must have brought fruit, for Congress, on July 7, 1838, passed an act approving every railroad in the United States as a post-route. The railroads accepted this responsibility with alacrity. The Baltimore & Ohio equipped compartments in baggage-cars running between Baltimore and Washington, which were kept tightly locked and to which only the postmasters of those two cities had access. Still the early methods of handling merchandise of every sort were crude and it was not until the days of the Civil War that the railroad mail service began to attain anything like its present precision and dispatch. Most great organisms are apt to trace their development to the brilliancy or the inspiration of one man or a group of men, and the railroad mail service has been no exception to that rule. W. A. Davis, a clerk in the post-office at St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1862, conceived the idea that railroad mail could be assorted on the cars before it reached St. Joseph. In those days, St. Joseph was a pretty important sort of a place. The overland mail started west from there, and Davis thought that if it could be at least partly assorted before it reached St. Joseph, there would be no delay in starting overland. The Post-office Department encouraged him and he began what was destined to become the most important and interesting function of the railroad mail service. In the same years that Davis was studying out postal problems at St. Joseph, Col. G. B. Armstrong was assistant postmaster at Chicago. He was asked by Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, of President Lincoln's Cabinet, to undertake the development of the railroad mail service. He accepted the task August 31, 1864, and a little later was made General Railway Mail Superintendent, a position which he held until 1871, when he was compelled to retire because of ill health. Col. George S. Bangs, of Illinois, succeeded him, and to Col. Bangs was given the opportunity of the third great development in the railroad mail service. In his report for the year 1874 he discussed the possibilities of establishing a fast and exclusive mail train between the two great postal centres of the land--New York and Chicago. To quote from Colonel Bangs' report: