# St. Louis Post Office and its amazing pneumatic tube



## CHamilton (Sep 6, 2012)

Here's an interesting piece of transportation history for you.

The secret history of the St. Louis Post Office and its amazing pneumatic tube



> In 1905, the St. Louis post office built a two-mile pneumatic tube system to deliver mail between the train station and the post office. It was expensive to maintain ($17,000 per year per mile of tube) and ruined a lot of mail.


It reminds me of the 1870 Beach Pneumatic Transit, which I first learned about many years ago from the book _Labyrinths of Iron: A History of the World's Subways_.


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## Bob Dylan (Sep 6, 2012)

CHamilton said:


> Here's an interesting piece of transportation history for you.
> 
> The secret history of the St. Louis Post Office and its amazing pneumatic tube
> 
> ...


Interesting Charlie, thanks for Posting! I miss the Mail Trains from the Old Days!


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## johnny.menhennet (Sep 6, 2012)

Very cool. The thing that sounds funny to me is that it could only hold 5 pounds of letter mail each 15 seconds and that was considered light loads! They often needed trucks for even more! Times sure have changed!


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