What is a TPO?

A Travelling Post Office (TPO) is a series of one or more rail carriages in which the manual sorting of letters takes place.  These carriages were invented to save time sorting mail while it was being transported to its destination. The picture below shows a 1988 TPO in its red Royal Mail livery.

Before the invention of the railways, mail was transported by road on horse-drawn carts and mail coaches.  By modern standards this was a slow and inefficient service in which mail was often delayed, lost or stolen. As early as August 1826 Rowland Hill had suggested the sorting of letters on mail coaches to improve the service, but this came to nothing.

The first public railway opened on 15 September 1830 between Liverpool and Manchester. It did not take long for the Post Office to make use of this more effective mode of transport. By 1838 the mail coaches for Manchester, Liverpool and Carlisle were being transported on rail trucks between Euston and Birmingham. You can see the last Louth to London mail coach on a rail wagon in the picture below.

Find out more about postal road transport in our exhibition Moving the Mail: Horses to Horsepower.

George Karstadt, a long-standing Post Office surveyor, made a formal proposal on 6 January 1838 to trial a 'travelling office' where mail could be sorted during transit. The first run took place that same month. With more railway lines being built the new TPO network rapidly expanded.

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