At the Illinois Railway Museum - 2011

Once again this year we went to the Illinois Railway Museum for a reunion of my dad and his coworkers who used to work on the Railway Post Office trains. Ian and Cami are pictured here inside the car that the IRM had running that day. Ian isn’t excited that the girl who is draped over him is his sister.

The kids have really grown up. I looked at older pictures and it is shocking to me how grown up they look in these pictures. I guess time is really getting on these days.

The weather was fabulous. It wasn’t hot (it can be really uncomfortable in the trains when it is hot) but it wasn’t cold either. And it didn’t rain! The mud there can be miserable when it rains.

The IRM also had the old sleeper cars open, but not running. They were really cool. The little rooms looked really comfortable. Each one had a toilet and at least one bed. There were sinks and controls for heat and AC. It made me long for the days gone by.

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.