Traveling Post Offices

[OliverNo11]

I was playing Pak128 Britain and I noticed that my TPO mail trains stop at every station I tell them. But they are TPOs so what if we could build a station to let mail be picked up and dropped off on the move?

[skreyola]

So, what you want is for mail trains to act like the Old West trains, where the towns hung out mail bags, and the trains picked them up without slowing down?
Interesting idea. I wonder if that could be done easily or not.
I think it's a good idea. It would certainly help keep the mail vehicles from lousing up passenger lines, but it would probably have to be limited to rails, as I've never seen such a thing in road transit.

[wlindley]

Mail hoops and bags thrown from moving trains persisted until the end of USA Railway Post Office (RPO) service circa 1968.

Through the wonders of modern automation, instead of your morning letter being hung trackside, picked by the next train, and delivered that same afternoon -- we now have centralized computerized sorting which delivers your letter four days later.  Let's hear it for progress.

[ӔO]

this can also be applied to rural area small airplanes that would grab and drop mail while still flying.
I believe this was called skyhooking and it was done because there were no adequate roads, rail or runways to regularly receive and deliver mail.

[skreyola]

This would all be neat. How hard would the programming be, though?
It would probably need to add a new schedule mechanic... for the mail vehicles to head out from their central office every X hours instead of whenever they got back there looping out again.