Santa Fe Railway mail car model

This is a model of an Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway Post Office (RPO) car. It is an HO-scale model, which stands for Half-O gauge. Each HO-scale model is 1/87th of the full-size prototype. It was manufactured by Athearn in the 1960s.

This model depicts a 'full' RPO--that is, one that has a sixty-foot interior. The end of the car that has several windows was the area in which newspapers and letter packages were sorted into sacks and pouches. The other half of a prototype car had distribution cases along both side walls, into which individual mail pieces were sorted. These cases are sometimes referred to as 'pigeon holes'. The doors on either end were kept closed and locked except when the adjoining car was for storage mail. RPO crew members would periodically pull additional sacks and pouches to be worked as mail in the car was sorted and dispatched.

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This page was imported from Smithsonian National Postal Museum. Released by the Smithsonian Institution under CC0 through Smithsonian Open Access.

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