In the same years that Davis was studying out postal problems at St. Joseph, Col. G. B. Armstrong was assistant postmaster at Chicago. He was asked by Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, of President Lincoln’s Cabinet, to undertake the development of the railroad mail service. He accepted the task August 31, 1864, and a little later was made General Railway Mail Superintendent, a position which he held until 1871, when he was compelled to retire because of ill health. Col. George S. Bangs, of Illinois, succeeded him, and to Col. Bangs was given the opportunity of the third great development in the railroad mail service. In his report for the year 1874 he discussed the possibilities of establishing a fast and exclusive mail train between the two great postal centres of the land—New York and Chicago. To quote from Colonel Bangs’ report:
“This train is to be under the control of the department so far as it is necessary for the purpose designed, and to run the distance in about twenty-four hours. It is conceded by railroad officials that this can be done. The importance of a line like this cannot be overestimated. It would reduce the actual time of mail between the East and the West from twelve to twenty-four hours. As it would necessarily be established on one or more of the trunk lines having an extended system of connections, its benefit would be in no case confined, but extended through all parts of the country alike.”
Postmaster General Jewell liked Col. Bangs’ idea and told him to arrange with the Lake Shore Railroad and the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad for a fast mail train to leave New York at four o’clock in the morning and make Chicago in twenty-four hours. But the Post-office Department, while it might grandly order fast mail trains into service, had no appropriation from which to pay for them. Nevertheless, Col. Bangs appealed to the older Vanderbilt, owner of both the New York Central and Lake Shore Railroads. Commodore Vanderbilt was not a sentimentalist. He had little use for men who came to him with risky propositions and empty pocketbooks. Nevertheless, the mail train idea appealed to the old railroader, and he turned to his son, William H. Vanderbilt, and asked him what he thought of the idea. The younger Vanderbilt suggested building the special cars needed for this service and placing the train in operation, with hopes of remuneration by the following Congress. He felt that the new trains would instantly become so popular as to compel Congress to provide for their up-keep.
“If you want to do this, go ahead,” said Commodore Vanderbilt, “but I know the Post-office Department, and you will, too, within a year.”
William H. Vanderbilt went ahead. He constructed and placed in service such trains—of glittering white and gold—as the railroad had never seen. Nightly they made their spectacular run between New York and Chicago with clock-work regularity. They never missed connections. The Pennsylvania Railroad quickly followed the example of its traditional rival. Within a half-year the United States had such a mail service as it had never dreamed of possessing, a mail service a quarter of a century ahead of any other nation in the world.
And yet Congress did the very thing that the sagacious old Commodore Vanderbilt had predicted. It absolutely refused to pay for the fast mail trains, and they were taken out of service. There was another factor in the situation, however, and that always a lively factor—the public. When the man out in Sioux City found that his mail was again taking eighteen additional hours to reach him from New York, he rose up in all the fulness of upstrung wrath and let his Congressman hear from him. And he was only one of tens of thousands whose business comfort had been heightened, quite imperceptibly, by the new trains, and upset very perceptibly by their withdrawal. They were returned to service in 1877, and have since become so recognized and useful a function of the mail service that it would be a brash Congress or Postmaster General who would even attempt to tinker with them.
Sometimes you brush elbows with the railroad mail service. You notice perhaps, the big heavy car up forward in the long train, with its open door and its gallows-like crane for snatching mail-bags, at cross-road stations, where the through train does not even deign to slacken speed. If you have had an important and delayed letter to post, you may have breathed your little prayer of thanks to the railroad mail because you are able to drop it into the slot of a car that stood, that was halted for an impatient minute or two in its race overland. But these are hardly more than superficialities of the service. If you wish to come closer to its heart, present yourself sometimes just before dawn at one of the great railroad terminals of a really metropolitan city. You had better present yourself in spirit and not in flesh, because this busy time—when most honest men are asleep—is not a time when visitors are welcomed. The Government is singularly diffident about showing the inner workings of its Post-office Department.
But these inner workings are alive and alert at three o’clock of the morning that you come to the platform sheds of the big terminal—you can see the shadowy outline of the darkened building itself rising up behind you. Most of its platforms which by day are constant and brisk little highways, are also darkened. The long files of empty coaches that line these platforms reflect in their many windows the signal lights of the outer yard. Now and again you catch the flicker of a pointed yellow light against the background of blackness—the bobbing of a watchman’s lantern as he sees that all is well in the few hours of comparative quiet that come to this great terminal.
This one train platform is alert and alive—brilliant under the incandescence of electricity. A brigade of shirt-sleeved men line it, while to its outer edge one great wagon after another—each showing the red, white, and blue of government service under the reflections of the arcs—comes rolling up, with a fearful clatter over the rough pavement of the station yard. From the cavernous recesses of these great wagons their stores are poured forth—dozens and dozens of mail sacks of leather and canvas, each tagged and directed with absolute accuracy.