Rail Mail (Switzerland)
The railway mail operation was in Switzerland received the 1,847th
history
As early as 1847, mail was carried on the Spanish-Brötli-Bahn on the route from Zurich to Baden and accompanied by a conductor in a baggage car.
Rail mail cars were first used in 1857 on the Swiss Northeast Railway on the Zurich – Baden – Brugg route. The interior of the rail mail car was extremely sparse. The first rail mail cars were owned by the railway companies, and the Swiss PTT had to pay interest on the acquisition costs, the depreciation amounts and maintenance. In 1866, the Post bought all of the 24 rail mail cars in service at the time from the railway companies and commissioned the construction of ten new cars, which contained a piece room, a bag compartment, an office and a dressing room with a toilet.
A milestone in the history of rail mail was the opening of the Gotthard Railway in 1882. For the first time, mail could be transported over the main Alpine ridge , almost independently of the weather , and not over the Gotthard Pass as was previously the case. The first mail was transported through the Gotthard tunnel on January 1, 1882, five months before the official opening .
The introduction of night railroad posts in 1886 represented a further acceleration of mail transport. Rail post offices were introduced to cope with the increasing tasks of rail mail; The first in Basel in 1891, and others followed by 1909 in Zurich, Bern, Lausanne, Lucerne, St. Gallen, Chur and Geneva.
The rail mail network was then expanded further, so there were 273 rail mail courses in 1893.
The rail mail cars continued to develop during this time. Initially, they were light two-axle wagons, followed by gallery wagons with open side aisles from 1875 and three-axle wagons with skylights at the turn of the century . Until 1891 people worked under candlelight, kerosene and gas lamps. Electric lighting was only introduced later.
For the Swiss National Exhibition (“Landi”) in 1939, the postal administration procured the four-axle Z4i 923 rail mail car, which was known as the “Landiwagen”, was 22.7 meters long and had 34 lamps and 20 arched windows in the roof. The washing facility, which provided warm water in winter, was particularly convenient. This was the first really functional rail mail car, which was also characterized by efficient use of space. This was followed by light steel wagons from 1946 , which could be added to the emerging light express trains.
Before the introduction of postcodes , in particular, excellent knowledge of geography and the PTT transport system was required to work in the rail mail van. Before being admitted to the rail mail service, the rail mail examination had to be passed. Due to its complex processes and high requirements, rail mail was considered an important step in a PTT career. Most of the officers in cadre positions had previously 'driven', as it was expressed in post office jargon.
In 1990, 640 rail mail and mail wagons ran daily on the SBB network and 51 on the private railways . The rail mail cars operated by SBB covered around 33 million kilometers a year and 440 employees worked regularly in the transport service. With its letter and parcel post, PTT was Deutsche Bahn's largest customer.
Due to the centralization of the parcel sorting and later the letter post in some parcel and letter post centers spread across the country , more and more rail post rates were dropped and at the beginning of August 2004, with the transfer of newspaper transport from rail to road, the era of accompanied rail mail cars in Switzerland was over.
Although mail is still transported between the sorting centers by rail, it is no longer sorted on the train. For the most part, the typical mail trolleys are still used for letter mail, which are loaded with special roll pallets. Container wagons are used for parcel post, which run with Swiss Post's own swap bodies.
From 1952 to 1982, the PTT also operated its own trolleybus trailer for transporting rail mail on the Thun – Beatenbucht trolleybus overland line . Previously, on the Steffisburg – Thun – Interlaken tram , two mail trailers with tires were used in addition to normal mail cars.
See also
Museums
Many mail wagons are kept in working order by railway associations .
- The Swiss rail mail car Z4i 923 (Landiwagen) is a historic vehicle owned by SBB Historic .
literature
-
Manual dictionary of the postal system , published by the Federal Ministry for the postal and telecommunications system,
- 2nd completely revised edition, Frankfurt am Main 1953.
- 3rd completely revised edition, Volume 1, Berlin 1971.
Web links
- The rolling post office: The rail mail on the oral history website of the PTT archive
Individual evidence
- ↑ Reini Meier: 140 years of Bahnpost - and what about 2137? Trade union considerations and demands on the occasion of the anniversary exhibition on Saturday, September 27, 1997 in Zurich main station. Ed .: PTT Union. Widerdruck Cooperative, Bern 1997, p. 10 .
- ^ Heike Bazak: The history of postal logistics in Switzerland . In: Iron Library, Foundation of Georg Fischer AG (Ed.): Ferrum, News from the Iron Library . No. 88, 2016 . Sonderegger Publish AG, 2016, ISSN 1422-9137 , p. 76-81 .
- ^ The rolling post office: Die Bahnpost on the Oral History website of the PTT archive
- ^ Karl Kronig: Tram Museum Zurich: Rail and Post, 150 years of collaboration. August 9, 1997, archived from the original on May 22, 2006 ; Retrieved January 7, 2013 .
- ^ Claude Jeanmaire: The trams of Bern and Thun . Archive No. 5. Verlag Eisenbahn, Villigen AG 1969, ISBN 3-85649-005-1 .