Yesterday we had the pleasure of welcoming some very special visitors to our railway: thirteen postal sorters who worked aboard our Travelling Post Office (TPO) carriage. The group travelled from Dublin to Downpatrick for a reunion with their fellow postal sorters and our TPO 2977, which was built in 1958 and is still owned by An Post.
While the rest of the island was sound asleep, these men sorted mail en route between Dublin and Cork or Galway. Even though the Travelling Post Office service stopped in 1994, the group was able to recount life on board and the process of sorting mail as if it were yesterday – some of them even recognised themselves in the audiovisual display that we have inside the carriage! One of our visitors was even on board during the Sallins train robbery in 1976, when £200,000 was stolen from a TPO train which was held up in County Kildare.
After a bit of a sing-along to recreate the last TPO train in the 1990s, the group headed down to our workshop to see our ‘tin van’ TPO which is being converted to a generator/brake van. A few of the older members of the group remembered these coaches working the Sligo mails, which stopped in 1978. One was even trained to work the “apparatus”, a net which collected bundles of mail on the move and fell out of use in the early 1970s.
The smiles of our visitors is what makes all of our hard work at Downpatrick worthwhile – without our volunteers and supporters, memories, culture, and ways of life like this would be lost forever.
