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Christmas card
Page 68
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Royal Mail delivers about 150 million cards and parcels a day in the run-up to Christmas, and each letter box and post office will be filled with items that need to be delivered to different locations across the UK and the world.
To find out what goes into the process, we decided to post a Christmas card, first class, from CMs base in Sutton and track its path to the Isle of Kerrera, which is in the Inner Hebrides.
The Royal Mail runs its own fleet of 33,000 vehicles. These range from quad bikes to vans and trucks. About 5,000 vehicles in the fleet are over 3.5-tonnes, and our card gets to travel in three of them.
Most local collections and deliveries are made by small vans. The 3.5-tonners are used for transferring mail between offices, while the 7.5-tanners and artics shift mail between mail centres and distribution hubs. However, since our letter is going to such a remote location, it takes a few extra modes of transport to get to its final destination.
We post our letter at lunch-time in a post box outside the office in Sutton. At 6pm, the letter box is emptied and our Christmas card is transferred by Royal Mail van to the Croydon Mail Centre, where it is sorted with other mail into different destinations.
By lOpm our letter is onboard a truck, either a 3.5-tonner or a 7.5-tanner, depending on the quantity of post to be shifted, heading from the Croydon Mail Centre to Stansted Airport, where it is moved on to a Royal Mail plane and takes off for Edinburgh Airport. Once in Scotland. our Christmas card is loaded onto a 7.5-tonne truck and driven to the Glasgow Mail Centre.
It should reach the mail centre by lam. At the Glasgow Mail Centre, the post will be sorted again and our letter sent to the delivery office in Oban. it leaves Glasgow at Sam and, depending on how much mail is heading in the same direction, it will travel on either a 3.5-tanner or a 7.5-tanner, At Barn, the card is transferred from Oban delivery office to the port in Oban by van, where it is placed on a ferry to Kerrera.
Once it has made the short journey across the water, our card makes the final section of its fourney by quad bike, and in less than 24 hours has reached its destination, despite being sent to such a remote location,