Illinois Railway Museum

Many years ago, back in the '50s and '60s, my father used to ride the Railway Post Office trains as his job when he first started to work for the Postal Service. Every year he attends a reunion of guys who also rode the trains, but this year they organized a special meeting at the Illinois Railway Museum.


The IRM has one of the original cars so they hitched it up to an engine and they ran it around the museum so people could see how they worked. Not only that the local Post Master came up with a commemorative cancelling stamp and they were running real mail through the cars. People could buy post cards at the gift shop, the car would pick it up and the letter would be cancelled on the car, and then put into a bag and dropped off again.


Here is a video of the mail car grabbing the mail bag off of the hook. The person grabbing the bag from the train is my dad.

Later in the day we got to ride inside the car and watched how everything worked. Here is a short video of that.