Rail mail car
Rail mail cars are classed as passenger coaches and not freight cars . The mail items transported by the railway mail are or have been sorted in them.
Task of the rail mail car
Since the beginning of the development of the railroad in the 1840s, the postal administrations have used the railroad to carry mail. As early as 1841 "railway mail cars" running on the rails were introduced. From 1875 onwards, these rail vehicles owned by the Post were given the name “Bahnpostwagen” (Bpw). In addition to the rail mail carriages, railway wagons were also used to transport mail, be it in the form of boxcars for parcel transport or in the form of mail compartments in passenger coaches. The rail mail cars are either placed individually in the passenger trains or driven in larger numbers as components of express freight and freight trains with mail transport. In terms of postal mail , the latter is referred to as postal trains , because their timetable is largely based on the needs of mail transport and the handling of the rail postal service , such as the Post InterCity in Germany and later the Parcel InterCity or in France the TGV postal .
Development of the rail mail car construction
Rail mail cars belong to the class of passenger coaches. Accordingly, they must also comply with all the technical regulations for passenger coaches, which have essentially been laid down at international level. Following the design development of passenger coaches from the very beginning, rail mail coaches have had the same designs in terms of their external design and box construction as those. Letter and universal mail coaches that are used during the journey require equipment that they are called Makes the workplace suitable. The requirements for the running gear are comparable to sleeping and couchette cars; in addition, heating and lighting must be largely independent of movement and supply by the train locomotive. This was usually achieved through increased battery capacity, additional axle generators and internal heating. Car crossings were not provided for, apart from exceptional cases, since rail mail cars were not allowed to be entered by non-postal persons during operation. This also resulted in the need to provide sanitary facilities. Entrance areas at the ends of the car often served as a shunting cab without any connection to the rest of the car interior or with a door that could be locked from the inside. With the introduction of roll containers, the contents of which did not need to be processed during the journey, mail wagons of the freight wagon type were again produced from around 1960. Some postal administrations also procured their own container wagons classified as rail mail wagons. For use in passenger trains, the freight wagon type mail wagons received a main air reservoir line and through lines for steam and electrical heating in addition to a running gear designed for the required travel speed.
Classes and registration numbers of the rail mail wagons
The mail items (letter mail) are not only transported in the rail mail car, but also processed, ie distributed according to locations and routing units, so that the valuable hours of travel time are used. The parcels and parcel sacks are also put together in stacks for the transhipment or destination offices on the route and, like the letter bags, are exchanged at the relevant train stations. For this work, an interior is required that is similar to that of a letter and parcel distribution point or a packing chamber in a post office. According to this, a distinction is made between three types of workspaces in the rail mail wagons, which recur in various combinations in many types of wagons:
- The "letter room" equipped with work tables and letter distribution frameworks for letter distribution,
- the "out-bag room" equipped with a large work table for pouring out the bags with mail items to be processed and a large bag clamping device for receiving the initially empty letter bags into which the letter bundles are distributed,
- and the "parcel or packing room", which is equipped with packing boards along the side walls and a rack (packing rods) stretched over the entire area at a height of 2 m to accommodate the largest possible amount of coarse cargo (parcels, parcel sacks, parcel bags, mail items).
Rail mail cars often have a slot for mail from the platform, similar to the slot in post boxes .
Museums
Many mail wagons are kept in working order by railway associations .
- The Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft Bahnpost e. V. operates a rail mail museum with its fully equipped rail mail car in Losheim am See and also uses the cars in historical special mail trains or lets them ride on special trains on museum railways.
- One of the famous Bahnpostwagen the Royal Mail ( postal robbery ) is exhibit in Birmingham Railway Museum
- The Swiss rail mail car Z4i 923 (Landiwagen) is a historic vehicle owned by SBB Historic .
- Many former rail mail cars survived as disco, bar and baggage cars at the rail transport company .
See also
literature
Web links
- Mike`s Bahnpostseite private website about the Bahnpost
- The railway mail museum of the BArGe Bahnpost e. V. Railway Post Museum Losheim am See
- Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft Bahnpost e. V. BArGe Bahnpost e. V.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Concise dictionary of the postal system; 3. Edition; P. 181
- ↑ Concise dictionary of the postal system; 3. Edition; P. 182
- ↑ Concise dictionary of the postal system; 3. Edition; P. 182
- ↑ Concise dictionary of the postal system; 3. Edition; P. 184
- ↑ Concise dictionary of the postal system; 3. Edition; P. 185
- ↑ http://www.bahnpostmuseum.eu/