By Elliott West
Introduction
On your travels on the London Underground, you may have spotted one of the many stainless steel boxes marked ‘Staff Letters’, on the platforms that are dotted around the network. Now sealed and redundant, they once provided a crucial form of communication to employees as thousands of pieces of mail were sent long before the dawn of the internet and the click of an email. These boxes were once the equivalent of the Royal Mail red post boxes and were eventually sealed up in the 1980s
On Guard
Up until the mid-1980s, internal mail was carried and delivered by the now-defunct role of the train guard. These guards would post letters in various coloured reusable envelopes in the ‘staff letters’ boxes on platforms. These boxes were located opposite the guard’s position in the last carriage, thereby allowing train displacement. If the destination train was off that particular line, then specially timetabled dispatch trains were used. As the trains moved down the line, those stations with mail to deliver would be waiting on the platform to pass to the guard.
As well as staff mail, trains would also carry Revenue Dispatch bags to Edgware Road, used tickets in wicker baskets to the Ticket Sorting Office at Harrow-on-the-Hill, lost property in padlocked cases to Baker Street and line correspondence to the four Divisional Managers Offices in DMO envelopes. All of these had their own routes and the used tickets even had their own cross-line printed timetable. All of this may seem very hit-and-miss and overcomplicated but it worked well for many years. It only came to an end with the introduction of One Person Operation on trains in 1984.
