Rail mail comes back to life as tourist attraction

IT MAY be snail mail today, but with its own underground railway and a plan to send letters to the Scottish islands by rocket, the British postal service was the information superhighway of its time.

The railway, 70ft below London’s streets, closed 14 years ago but is about to come back to life as a tourist attraction. However, in time-honoured postal tradition, it is being delivered later than families might have hoped, and will miss the summer holidays.

The 6.5-mile train network is the centrepiece of the new Postal Museum, the rest of which opens today. Built in 1927, the track stretches from Whitechapel in the east to Paddington in the west, and once carried up to 12 million items of mail each year.

The museum’s deputy director Tim Ellison said it had a

air now. “Everybody walked out in 2003 and only now are people walking back in,” he added.

Visitors will descend into the railway’s former engineering depot for a 20-minute journey through narrow tunnels, stopping at the original Mount Pleasant sorting office station, where audio-visual displays will describe life on the network.

The miniature engine and carriages were driverless, and “way ahead of their time”, Mr Ellison said.

But the railway was less futuristic than the Post Office’s proposal to deliver letters to the remotest parts of northern Britain by rocket.

Gerhard Zucker, an engineer who emigrated here from Germany, carried out a series of “rocket mail” tests for the British government in 1934. His idea was to pack letters into explosive-driven zinc cylinders and fire them to their intended destinations. The experiment failed and Zucker was deported. Back home, he was arrested on suspicion of co-operating with the British.

His plans and drawings are on display in the museum, which also houses the sculpture of the