Why did Mail Rail close?

It has been over 20 years since the last mail carrying train ran on Mail Rail. In May 2003 the service came to an end and Mail Rail was mothballed as an operating railway.

How Mail Rail looked in the 1980s. A worker loads mail bags into a container, which gets loaded onto the train. CT00357002

The need for an underground mail railway

Operations began for the railway in late 1927 when it carried the first parcel traffic in time for the Christmas pressure that year. The railway had been designed to speed the movement of mail across the capital and link together some of London’s mainline railway stations with some of the major district offices in the area. 

Map showing the route of the Post Office Railway POST 20/128

In early 20th century, London post for each postal district was sorted in its own dedicated district office. So, post for the eastern district was sorted at the Eastern District Office on Whitechapel Road, the south west district at Howick Place and so on. Eventually those London districts became more recognisable to us as the London postcode districts (E, SW, SE, N etc.).

The district offices, effectively sorting offices, had to get post to each other and to and from the central London mainline railway stations which brought post in and took post out to the rest of the country.  

Map showing the London Postal Districts in 1870 POST 21/69

As well as district offices serving their local area, some London offices had additional responsibilities. King Edward Building acted as the Foreign Section, handling mail internationally, and Mount Pleasant, now home to The Postal Museum, handled mail for the rest of the UK, known as the Inland Section. This meant post was moving regularly across the capital. At the beginning of the 20th century this was a problem with the streets congested by horse drawn vehicles, poor roads, traffic, bad weather and pollution hampering the speedy movement of the mail.  

The solution was the Post Office (London) Railway which opened in 1927 to speed the mail silently under the streets, away from the traffic and congestion, and uninterrupted by weather. At its opening it linked six district offices with two mainline railway stations. 

Stations such as Euston took the mail out to the rest of the country ‘London Euston Loading the Travelling Post Office’ by Grace Golden POST 109/374

The decline of the district office

As the 20th century advanced, machines came in to take over and speed up some of the process, and the need for quite so many district offices began to pass. It was no longer necessary to have an office in each district. Even with rising volumes of post in the 1970s and 80s, machines meant mail could be sorted quickly.

Mechanisation, as it was known (the introduction of machines to sort the post), also meant that some offices were too small for the larger machines that were beginning to appear, and some did not offer enough space for vehicles to park to take post on its onward journey. This resulted in some changes to the operation in London.

In 1965 the two small Western District Offices were closed and their operation combined into a new larger, fully mechanised office at Rathbone Place, off Oxford Street. This closed two of the original Post Office Railway stations, but resulted in the opening of a new one at this new office. 

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This new station was to be the largest development and change in network in its history, but was perhaps an early sign of changes that were to come. By the mid 1990s, with mail volumes still high, operations were changing. King Edward Building was no longer the international office, a new international hub was eventually opened at Heathrow. The former Western Central District Office, that served the central WC postcode area was merged with the Mount Pleasant Mail Centre. The Eastern District Office at Whitechapel was moving from being a large district office to a smaller local delivery office, handling only local post.

The end of Mail Rail

Suddenly the Post Office Railway, which at its peak in the mid-1980s was renamed Mail Rail, no longer served as many stations as it originally had. In addition to the closure of some of the sorting offices another major change was on the cards, this one in time would have a major impact on Mail Rail. 

In 1995 a project called Rail Net moved the operation of mainline trains by Royal Mail away from central London stations like Liverpool Street and Paddington to a new purpose-built hub in Willesden, West London, called the Princess Royal Distribution Centre. There were several reasons for this. The desire to have a single hub for post to travel in multiple directions away from London was a major factor. It was also the aim of Network Rail, who operated the London mainline stations, to remove mail carrying trains from their stations to make more room for passengers.

This project was what really spelt the end for Mail Rail in its role carrying post. Once the London mainline stations were lost, the railway was suddenly only carrying post between a small number of sorting offices.

By 2003 the decision was taken to mothball the railway. The Eastern District was only operating as a local delivery office, Liverpool Street and King Edward Building were no longer being used and nor was the Western Central District Office that merged with Mount Pleasant. By May 2003 only Mount Pleasant, Rathbone Place (Western District Office) and Paddington District Office were still in use. It was not economically nor environmentally viable to run a railway for those three stations, so the decision was taken to stop Mail Rail operations. 

Mail Rail train and Platform at Mount Pleasant after closure.

On 31 May 2003 trains carrying post ran for the last time on Mail Rail. The system was powered up for one last time in 2005 to film some of the railway for The Postal Museum’s collection and after this it was shut down for the final time and a while later the electrical system was disconnected from the 11,000-volt supply and safely shut down. 

The railway was then given a new lease of life when opened by The Postal Museum in 2017. 

Want to experience Mail Rail for yourself? Come and visit us. Find out more about the Mail Rail ride.