Railway mail clerk

A short trial of sorting mail on a train ran in 1862. The first permanent railway post office route followed on August 28, 1864, between Chicago and Clinton, Iowa, and the Railway Mail Service was officially inaugurated in 1869. By 1890 some 5,800 postal railway clerks worked over 154,800 miles of railroad, and by 1907 over 14,000.

The service peaked in the 1920s and declined after that; the last railway post office ran between New York and Washington in 1977. The Railway Mail Service belonged to the U.S. Post Office Department, so its clerks were postal employees rather than railroad men.