After 190 years, why is Royal Mail abandoning its trains?

“This is the night mail crossing the border / Bringing the cheque and the postal order …”

So wrote WH Auden in his poem Night Mail, which accompanied a black-and-white documentary made in 1936 about overnight postal deliveries by train. The cheque and postal order are becoming museum pieces, and now the rail service Auden praised is about to go the same way.

Postal deliveries by rail have been running in Britain since 1830: 130 trains were carrying mail before the Second World War. Workers manned travelling sorting offices such as the one seen in Night Mail. The service survived the Great Train Robbery of 1963, when Bruce Reynolds and accomplices stole £2.61 million from a Royal Mail train, coshing the driver Jack