London opens its rail mail
London: Few of the millions of people whose letters and packages were shuttled on a tiny train line deep under London ever suspected it existed.
But now the public will get a chance to hop aboard the so-called Mail Rail that not even the brutal Nazi bombing of the Blitz could stop.
Moving at just 6.4 kilometres per hour, the twofoot-wide train takes visitors along Mail Rail’s tunnels, passing a “train graveyard” and two ghostly abandoned platforms along the way.
“It was only ever meant to be a railway for post,” Adrian Steel, the Postal Museum’s director, said.
“This is the first time that people will be able to ride some of the tunnels, see some of the engineering and discover the story of the postal railway”.
For most of the 20th century and unbeknownst to most of the residents in the British capital, six and a half miles of tunnels dug under their feet ferried millions of letters a day between different sorting facilities and London’s main railway stations.
Starting on September 4, the Mail Rail will instead ferry people on a one-kilometre loop, bringing to life a slice of London history on what was the world’s first driverless electric train.
Work on Mail Rail started in 1914 but construction had to be put on hold just a year later as World War I raged across Europe, causing a scarcity of labour and materials.
During the war, some of the tunnels were used for storing priceless art works to avoid air raids.
The trains began operating in 1927 and cut delivery times between the different London sorting facilities from several hours to just 30 minutes.