It
appears that trolleys first carried closed pouch mail in the U.S. in
about
1890, on the Minneapolis--St Paul intercity system, and on a small New
York
state line known as the Dunkirk and Fredonia Railway.
A more sophisticated system was introduced in
St Louis in 1891, however, and this experiment quickly evolved into the
first
trolley RPO service, known as the St Louis and Florissant RPO by early
1893. Other major cities followed
quickly, and by 1896, POD appropriation bills were carrying a separate
item for
the transport of mail by electric and cable car.
Vermont never had a true trolley
RPO, but at
least 8 of its 10 systems* did carry closed pouch mail under government
contract. The history of street railways
in Vermont is straightforward (see Vermont Life, Albert C. Spaulding,
"Five Cents to Everywhere: A Chronicle of Green Mountain Trolleys,
Kings
of Main Street", Spring 1964).
Details of trolley mail in Vermont come from several sources,
however,
and here things are more complicated.
From 1898 until 1905, the Annual Report of the PMG provides a
detailed
list of electric car service, state by state.
Thus one can learn, for example, that three Vermont trolley
lines were
carrying closed pouch mail in 1898, but not the exact dates of the
contracts
(see Table I below). From 1906 on,
however, the Annual Reports show only Vermont "trolley miles", so
that while one can see when a new route was added, it is not easy to
figure out
what particular line it was. Also, in
later years, even this information drops out, and all that the tables
in the
Annual Reports show are electric car service miles by "contract
section".
*There
were numerous amalgamations,
reorganizations and name changes, making it difficult to settle on an
exact
number of lines (e.g., Military Post Rwy Co, operated for most of its
existence
as part of Burlington Traction; see the Table).
Information on electric car mail
contracts
(and much, much more) is also shown in the Daily Bulletins, but except
for two
years (1900, '01), the author has not yet faced up to the task of
combing these
systematically. The Official Register of
the United States also lists mail contractors providing electric car
service in
Vermont for certain years.
Then
there are the biennial reports of the Vermont Railroad Commissioners
(Vermont
PUC) which show income received by railroad and trolley lines under
various
categories, including mail contracts, from 1902 until 1916 (no detail
from then
on); and the First Division Railway Mail Service schedules also show
the lines
with mail contracts (the schedules examined by the author were for
1915, '25,
'27, '31, '33 and '35).
Using
these sources, then, there were, as mentioned above, three Vermont
mail-carrying trolley routes by 1898; a 4th was added in 1900; a 5th in
1901
(for some strange reason, there was never a route 005, the 5th route
was
303006); a 6th in 1905 or 1906; and another by 1909, amounting
altogether to
40.86 miles at an annual cost to the government of $2,865.32. An 8th
mail-carrying line was added sometime between 1909 and 1913. Whether all of these closed pouch routes
continued until the lines themselves closed down, has not yet been
established.
(see Table 1).
The assistance of Frank Scheer (Railway Mail Service Library, 12 East Rosemont Ave, Alexandria, Va, 22301-2325), J. R. McFarlane, and Eleanor J. Elwert (Rutland Historical Society) is gratefully acknowledged