Why Royal Mail’s decision to stop using trains is another nail in their coffin

Just possibly all is not lost. Maggie Simpson, director general of the Rail Freight Group, the umbrella organisation for the industry, reckons several companies may be interested in carrying mail: “I am optimistic that some of this traffic will eventually find its way back. Rail has so many advantages, notably environmental and speed, that logically it should work.” She points to the fact that the remaining rail service carries only first and second-class letters when the big and growing market is the transport of parcels. Moreover, the Royal Mail has been left with major depots at places such as Willesden in north-west London and Daventry in the Midlands, which remain ready to use. 

There is, too, a wider political point. Royal Mail argued that part of the reason for the abandonment of mail rail was uncertainty over the future support available from the Government. Now there is pressure on the new Government to demonstrate its green credentials given that the loss of the mail trains is a political embarrassment. It seems rather emblematic of the “Broken Britain” narrative that Labour is anxious to dispel, though, in fairness, even the French gave up running postal trains on their high speed network after 30 years in 2016 because of falling demand. Carrying freight by rail is enormously popular with the public, who are always keen to see fewer lorries on the road, and therefore the Government would win brownie points by providing subsidies for companies seeking to use rail instead.

Given the rapid and continuing decline in the number of letters posted each year, parcels represent the best hope for a renewed overnight mail on rail service. However, trying to persuade the big players who distribute millions of parcels annually, such as FedEx or Amazon, to use rail is an uphill task given that their distribution centres tend not to be near a railhead. One small light on the horizon is Varamis Rail, which is already operating a single daily service every weekday in each direction between Glasgow and Birmingham. In terms of timing, the service is competitive, as the journey takes just four hours, which is faster than on the road.

So rail mail of sorts may live on. But those wonderful travelling post offices with dozens of staff stumbling around long corridors on rattling trains, sorting the mail, will never return – something which WH Auden, who died in 1973, surely never envisaged.