I recently purchased an envelope from an online auction site that featured a couple of Newfoundland stamps and a cancellation from the Bonavista railway post office.
I’m not a philatelist (stamp collector). My dad was. He had a fairly extensive stamp collection (sold after his death). My dad collected a lot of things! For example – his phone battery collection.
The reason why I purchased this envelope is simple – I had a gift credit card that was about to expire and it had about a dozen dollars remaining on it. I did a quick search and found this, and it used up the remaining credit on the card.
I find that very hard to read, but it looks like April 5, 1946 to me on the postmark to the left.
A railway post office (RPO) was a rail car with a complete post office inside, staffed by post office employees. They ranged in size from a small compartment at one end of a passenger car to a full size car dedicated to the post office. Budd produced two versions of their popular rail diesel car (RDC) with RPOs taking up part of the RDC-3 and the entire RDC-4 model.
Mail was picked up and dropped along the route, with postal workers on board sorting mail as the train traveled the route. Cars had a mail slot where people could insert letters while the train was stopped at a station, and it would be “cancelled” with a stamp like the one above.
According to Brian Stalker’s list of Newfoundland RPOs and TPOs*, compiled by Lew Ludlow, railway post office service ceased to Bonavista in 1961. The last RPOs ran in Canada in 1971.
* TPO = Traveling Post Office
Canadian National applied to abandon the Bonavista subdivision in May 1983 [Branchline 1983-07, p8]. The CTC [Canadian Transport Commission] granted this permission on May 16, 1984. The mixed trains 205 and 206 operating at this time were also discontinued, with the last trains operating until June 20, 1984 [Trackside Newfoundland, Bill Linley].
There is one railway post office car remaining in Newfoundland, number 1805, outside the Railway Coastal Museum.
Just One More Thing
A few references:
I keep looking for the book “A History of Canadian RPOs 1853-1967” [American Philatelic Society]. It’s available on eBay but I’m not willing to pay $75-80 for it.
Trains 9 and 10 handled much of the mail through here. These trains ran Winnipeg – Calgary and carried several post office and baggage cars. I believe this train stopped operating on the Togo Sub. in 1963. Interestingly I found a number of wooden stamps used at various locations on the line including a number of locations that did not have stations or agencies to stamp mail. I gifted them to my father one Christmas. Unfortunately during recent refurbishments to the house I think they were thrown out.
From what I have read, many of the dedicated passenger trains on branch lines in the west in the late 1950s / early 1960s were mostly mail and express cars. When the railways lost the mail contracts, the passenger trains disappeared.