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Show Railway Postoffice Is Important Link in U. S. Mails 111., on account of the Civil war, be sorted while it was aboard the train. A few yeers of experimenting proved the merits of this idea and the use of railway post offices became be-came a reality. Originally the post office cars were used only on the main lines of long-run railroads, but today nearly near-ly every line in the country has service to form a network encompassing encom-passing every town and hamlet of our nation. Within these rolling post offices efficient crews of clerks not only break down mail shipments into section and state groups, but also sort it for cities and then go further to separate individual letters destined des-tined for different postal stations in a given city. A clerk on the New York to Washington run, for example, is expected to know the exact location of any address in New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington Washing-ton and perhaps several other intermediate inter-mediate cities served by that route. The efficiency of the United States mail is so taken for granted that very few people really know what takes place between the time a stamped envelope is deposited in one of those familiar olive-colored boxes and when it is received by the addressee. ad-dressee. Strange as it may seem, only a small proportion of out-of-town mail is actually sorted in the marble palaces whose portals are inscribed, "Neither sleet or rain . . ." A letter from New York to San Marino, Calif., for example, is handled han-dled once in New York and once in San Marino. In the meanwhile, however, that envelope may be sorted sort-ed half a dozen times in order to speed it on its way in the shortest possible time. For some unknown reason the United States post office rarely mentions the RPO (Railway Post Office) and its important part in the distribution of mail, hence very few people realize that without it our present postal service would be an impossibility. In this country the use of the railway rail-way postal car dates to 1861, when John L. Scripps, then postmaster of Chicago, suggested that the mail which had accumulated at Cairo, |