IMAGE OF THE MONTH: New museum delivers the goods

Date: Monday, October 2, 2017   |  

A 1980s Dodge Spacevan post bus is one of the star attractions at a new museum in London dedicated to celebrating the history of the postal system.

Housed at the Postal Museum, which opened in July and is located in Clekernwell, post buses replaced traditional bus services on routes where it was not deemed financially viable enough to run a passenger service.

Post bus services started life in the late 1960s when several thousand miles of the nation’s railway network was torn up, and they still continue today, serving remote outposts in Scotland. Post buses were designed to transport mail between sorting offices and customer homes while offering a small number of seats for regular passengers.

The van on show worked the Crundale, Kent, route until 1985, and thereafter as a reserve at Canterbury until 1991.

Other highlights at the museum include a sculpture of the Queen, which is used to produce the image replicated on stamps, a gold Olympic post box, and Mail Rail, a series of underground tunnels beneath the capital that used to carry post and now transports visitors around the Mount Pleasant sorting office.



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