Inside Mail Rail
STEFANIE FOSTER visits London’s subterranean former Post Office railway to discover what visitors can expect once it opens to the public on September 4
RAIL visits London’s subterranean Mail Rail, ahead of the new visitor attraction opening next month.
Five centuries ago, a man needed to get a message to someone many miles away. And since he was the King, he needed to do it often. The only solution was a postal service, and thus Henry VIII established the Royal Mail, appointing a Master of Posts to oversee it. From that day in 1516 its requirement grew exponentially, until it finally became a public service on July 31 1635, under the reign of Charles I.
The trouble with public services is that they can quickly become popular and overcrowded. By the turn of the 20th century, the transportation of mail was suffering severe delays because London’s streets were just too busy. A committee was set up in 1909 to study underground pneumatic and electric railways, and, in 1911 they recommended construction of an electric railway with driverless trains.
In 1914, work began to build the London Post Office Railway - the world’s first driverless electric railway, to run the 6 ½ miles from Paddington to Whitechapel at up to 70 feet below the capital’s streets. The tunnelling, all of which was done by hand, was completed three years later, but war prevented money being spent on ordering or installing operating equipment until 1923.
The railway finally opened on December 5 1927 between Mount Pleasant Sorting Office and Paddington. It was soon followed by the full service to Liverpool Street, and the Eastern District Office in Whitechapel.
At its peak, Mail Rail (as it became known from 1987) transported up to four million letters in a 22-hour day and employed 220 staff. By the 1990s, the network was carrying six million bags of mail every year. But its use declined with the reduction in letter-writing and the increase in parcels that were too big to transport in narrow tunnels underground. It was no longer economical and eventually closed on May 31 2003. From September 4, the public will be able to ride the Mail Rail trains through tunnels dug by hand in 1917, and delve into the history of Royal Mail’s transport under London. POSTAL MUSEUM.
Mothballed ever since, it served as a time capsule that is about to be opened to the public for the first time.
RAIL visited Mail Rail in 2014, when the British Postal Museum & Archive (now the Postal Museum) announced plans to open the site as part of a grand plan to tell the story of postal history.
The £ 26 million scheme encompassed opening a section of the Mail Rail tunnels to the public and allowing them to ride bespoke trains to learn about the history of the site, as well as a new museum site across the road at Calthorpe House (a 1920s red-brick building on Phoenix Place) to tell the wider postal story.
Until a few weeks ago, it had been hoped that the whole museum would open as one on July 28, but only the main museum was
able to open on time - Mail Rail has been delayed until September 4.
The team at the museum is disappointed not to be able to open for the summer, but there are complications with installing modern-day equipment into 100-year-old tunnels that are more comfortable with their stalactites than audio-visual displays. Ongoing server failures have been a cause for concern, and so the decision was made that it would be better to delay rather than open with an unreliable visitor experience.
The Mail Rail ride and exhibition is based right in the heart of the Mail Rail network at Mount Pleasant. What was once the car depot, where all the maintenance was carried out on trains for the whole network, is now a flexible event space that can be hired by businesses. It is also the start of the museum experience.
On RAIL’s last visit, remnants of the day the railway closed littered every corner, down to discarded boots, half-empty bottles of shower gel and iron filings from a lathe long-since switched off. Today, all those relics are gone - but by no means forgotten.