SERVICE FIRST With C I Close Rein
Page 58
Page 59
Page 60
Page 63
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
By Alan Smith, F.R,S.A.
CONSTANT supervision is given to the operation of the General Post Office's 14,500 mail vans so that the primary necessity of giving speedy deliveries does not involve excessive cost. Increasing commercial activity and dispersal of sections of the population into housing estates and new towns away from city centres has been swelling the amount of mail, and the fleet has almost doubted since 1945, although this rise is partly because of wartime depletions being made good.
Each year the G.P.O. handle nearly 10,000m. letters and 250m. parcels. These may be posted at any of the 100,000 letter-boxes and 25,000 post offices in the country for delivery to 13m. different addresses. There is not always a balance between the amounts of mail going/into and out of a district. Residential areas tend to receive more letters than they send, whilst in industrial and commercial parts there are organizations who distribute their products by post as well as issuing circulars. At the Christmas peak, the volume of mail reaches about four times the average for the rest of the year. Football pools boost winter letter mails by about 15 per cent., and there is another fillip in postcards during the holiday season. Overseas letter mails, about half of which are dispatched by air, form approximately 5 per cent, of the total.
Head Postmasters
The country is divided into areas each containing a number of post offices. The chief of these is that of the head postmaster for the area, whilst the others, coming under his control, are in the charge of postmasters who are fully salaried or sub-postmasters paid according to the amount of G.P.O. work they do. Vehicles are based at head and certain subsidiary offices in numbers appropriate to the volume of mail dealt with.
The G.P.O.'s routine is geared to the fact that some three-quarters of all mail is posted late in the afternoon. Between 5.45-6.30 p.m., vans are sent out to collect correspondence from letter-boxes, and letters and parcels from post offices, to bring them to the centres where they are sorted. Many business houses have their mail collected at their premises, and such correspondence largely contributes to the peak of activity. Large vans take mail to the railway stations, and in the small hours these vehicles pick 1,24 :s delivered to the same points. Around breakne, the postmen are on their rounds delivering and on their return to their offices they empty oxes of mail posted after the last collection the .s day. Soon after 9 a.m. the small vans are sent deliver parcels.
are variations on this pattern, as may be expected, ng to local conditions. On country routes, corresce and parcels are combined as loads, and in busy the frequency of collections and calls at railway • is higher than elsewhere. In some towns, vans are • ith folding seats so that postmen may be carried to rting points of their rounds. This is done when
JS services are inconvenient or unavailable. Sometem are relay rounds, with vans bringing out second mail to postmen halfway through their walks.
t might be called the trunk routes taken by the mail lost entirely the preserve of the railways, but some ition on the direction of the loads is of interest.
Broadly, if a post office has sufficient mail to make up a reasonable load for a town, it is sent direct. Such a consignment is normally taken as a minimum. of 200 letters. If the number of letters is small, the correspondence is batched with others and sent to one of 37 distribution offices strategically placed on the railway network.
For example, Woking is such an office for Hampshire (including the Isle of Wight) and Dorset. A distant town may not have as many as 200 letters for any one place in these counties, but could make up a respectable load for all points in the two: a load of this kind would be sent to Woking and sorted there for final distribution. There is also a network of railborne travelling sorting offices.
Linking London Termini
Large vans may be used for " trunk " transport when rail links are inconveniently timed or non-existent. Employment of vehicles in this manner, however, is at its most impressive in London, where the absence of rail links between the termini around the centre is keenly felt. To an extent this deficiency is made good by the G.P.O.'s own underground railway, but over 500 vans shuttle between 12 main-line stations.
The G.P.O. have 4m. sacks for inland mails. There are two main kinds. That for letters lies flat when empty, having a seam at the bottom joining the sides; a parcel
sack has a square bottom. Sacks used for collecting correspondence from business houses are red, whilst others are of natural colour. The rule is that any sack may not be loaded with more than some 50-60 lb. Because, as explained, there are unbalances in the flow of mails along certain routes, a bag-control system supervises the return of empties from places where they may accumulate to others where they run short. Bristol, for example, collects more parcel bags than it can employ, and so dispatches surpluses to London.
There are four main types of vehicle in the G.P.O. mail fleet. These are the Morris Minor, the J and the 1-ton and 1+-ton normal-control vans. They are referred to in terms of their .body capacities, 50 cu. ft., 100 Cu. ft., 240 cu. ft. and 360 Cu. ft. respectively. There are nearly 7,500 Minors. over 4,000 Js, and some 3,000 of the largest two types each in approximately equal numbers. A Minor can carry 12-14 letter bags or seven parcels bags, and the capacities of the other sizes of van are proportional. It used to be the case that the G.P.O. had their own style of bodywork on the 240-cu.-ft. and 360-cu.-ft. vans, but lately the standard Morris LD1 forward-control van has been adopted for the 240-cu.-ft. type.
The G.P.O.'s transport is, of course, the most outstanding example of a one-make fleet, and is chiefly that way because of the economies in maintenance that result. (This aspect will be dealt with in a later article.) There is also the fact that a, one-driver, one-vehicle policy is out of the question, and the restriction of the fleet to a handful of models avoids difficulties that might otherwise arise if drivers had to acquaint themselves with the controls of many varying vehicles.
What might be described as special types are some 20 Karrier 600-cu.-ft. vans, with side doors to the body, employed mainly to carry large quantities of mail to ships, and for pools and mail-order traffic, also about 40 LandRovers used off the beaten track, Interest is being taken in oil-engine conversion and the adoption of plastics bodywork. Glass-fibre reinforced mudguards have been tried, and tenders for a number of plastics bodies for some 360-cu.-ft. vans are being examined.
Oil-engine conversion for medium-sized vans has been approached cautiously, but experience with a sample of 240-cu.-ft. and 360-cu.-ft. all engaged on similar work, 50 of which have petrol and 50 oil engines, during the past 16 months has shown no disparities in operational efficiency. A natural preference for the petrol engine's smoothness and quietness is held by some of those who have to drive the vans, but this is not so strong as to outweigh a halving of fuel costs by the oilers. Maintenance expenses seem to be about the same, but a full evaluation cannot be made until further experience has been gained. Average fuel-consumption rates for petrol vehicles are as follows: Minor, 26-30 m.p.g.; J, 18-22 m.p.g.; 240 cu. ft., 12-15 m.p.g.; 360 cu. ft., 10-12 m.p.g.; 600 cu. ft., 8 m.p.g.; Land-Rovers, 15-17 m.p.g. Austin Gipsies will soon be coming into service, and will have B.M.C. 2.2-litre oil engines. The Perkins Four-99 is being tested in a J. Vehicles average about 13,000 miles a year. At one time a number of combination motorcycles was used, but these have been superseded by Minors.
One may often appraise a whole by studying a part, and I visited the post office at Reading, Berks, for a close-up view of activity. Besides dealing with mail originating within and destined to a surrounding area of some 250 sq. miles, Reading is a point through which traffic from the south-east is channelled for the west and south-west, and serves also as a distribution office (as Woking does) for aggregated small lots for Berks, Bucks, Middx, Oxon and Wilts from elsewhere.
The stations are only 100 yd. away and instead of using vans it has been found cheaper and more convenient to employ petrol and electric tractors to shuttle with one trailer at a time between the post office and the different platforms. On dispatches out of Reading alone there are 150 trains with which to connect each weekday. A tractor leaves up to 30 min. before a train's time. One 360-cu.-ft.
and six 240-cu.-ft. vans are based at Reading. These collect from over 60 business houses and make certain runs to the post offices in outlying places. Minors and Is number two dozen, and 20 more are based at seven small ; around. Eleven vehicles of all types are in reserve. ;ading itself, the vans cover some 6,000 miles a week, t those operating in the rural areas dci the same.
i; machine which marks the stamps on letters also s them, and in a day the tally of this correspondence in Reading is some 80,000. The area has 20,000 itants, a university, a number of factories and is an holiday resort. On balance there is a slight pre!.rance on an inward rather than outward" volume ail, apart from that for which Reading acts in an )6t capacity. The actual proportions are 25.8 per for mail delivered in the 60 sq. miles, 24.3 per cent.
within it, and 49.9 per cent. forwarded.
ellite to Reading is the village of Pangbourne where 50-cu.-ft. vans are based. A van from the town calls early morning and again in the evening. Pangbourne [early 2,000 people, but, a sizeable residential-school ation probably accounts for the fact that in a week may be 30,000 letters and 565 parcels delivered to, nly 18,000 and 240 respectively posted in, the 70 sq. in which the four vans operate.
3ostmaster has a multitude of responsibilities, and to him in his job as a transport manager he is provided a manual of unusual detail and comprehensiveness. o him what Wisden is to the cricketer, or W.O.L.s are army adjutant. I was particularly interested in the procedure laid down for introducing or modifying vehicle operation with the object of economizing, and was shown an instance in which it had been proposed to add a second van at one of the sub-post offices.
The recording of statistics of vehicle operation is as concise as one might expect of a Government department, and a study of duty charts by the Reading head postmaster led him to suggest that an extra van for a full-time postman, who at that time had only a bicycle, would enable a part timer's services to be dispensed with. (In the event this employee took a vacancy that arose elsewhere.) The next step was to make out a " for and against" form, on which the cost of running the vehicle over an assessed weekly mileage could be checked against the saving of the parttimer's pay.
Money savings, of course, arc not considered in isolation, for besides the effects that changes might have on the staff there is above all the need to give the public good service. A head postmaster's proposals have to be checked at regional headquarters before being put into effect.
After his idea had been realized, it was found possible to cease delivery from another smaller post office, so that further savings resulted, providing an example of how the use of road transport by the G.P.O. is both a necessary instrument in speeding the mails and a means for doing so more cheaply.