The “Mail Catcher”
Note:
Mail Catcher -- an iron rod, or other contrivance, attached to a railroad car for catching a mail bag while the train is in motion.
United States mails are carried
in some of the fastest passenger and express trains in the country. Many of
these trains run long distances between important American cities, such as New
York and St. Louis, Chicago and San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles, and
Chicago and New Orleans. In order to maintain fast schedules, these trains stop
at only the larger cities en route.
However, with the aid of
mail cranes such as we see in the picture, it is possible for even the smallest
communities situated along the railroad to have adequate mail service at all
times. The mail crane enables the train to pick up a bag of mail without
stopping or slowing down. The crane is located alongside the track, near the
railway station. A mail messenger employed by the railroad or by the local post
office or some other authorized person, attaches the mail bag to the crane a
short time before the train is due.
On each side of the mail car of the
approaching train is a steel catcher arm. As the train nears the station, a
clerk in the mail car adjusts one of these catcher arms so that when it passes
the crane it catches the waiting mail bag where it is tied in the center. The
mail clerk then swings the catcher arm into the car and drops the bag on the
floor. He also throws off bags of mail at designated stations where they are
picked up by messengers and carried to the local post offices.
Another Description Instead of stopping at
every small town to transfer the mail, railway mail trains were fitted with
catcher arms that snatched mailbags off of cranes such as this. As early as
As tremendously
successful as it was, “mail-on-the-fly” still had its share of glitches. Clerks
had to pay special attention to raising the train’s catcher arm. If they
hoisted it too soon, they risked hitting switch targets, telegraph poles or
semaphores which would rip the catcher arm right off the train. Too late, and
they would miss an exchange and each missed exchange netted a clerk
Exchanging the mail was a two-part process, after the clerk
snagged the mail bag with the catcher arm, he had to toss out the mailbag for
that station. If a clerk did not kick the mailbag out far enough, it could get
trapped beneath the wheels of the train, bursting open and sending letters
flying everywhere. The clerks called such small disasters “snowstorms.” On the
other hand, too much “oomph” could also cause difficulties. One poor clerk tossed
the mailbag out with such force that it sailed through the bay window of the
station house.
The Mail Catcher 
Catcher Arm
Grabbing the Mail
Watch the Mail Crane in Action
(
In the early days of railroading,
the engine that pulled the rest of the train was equipped with a "cow
catcher" in the event that the train hit a cow or herd of cows. If a
cow was killed by a train, it was most likely because it got hit by the cow
catcher, not the caboose. Encyclopaedia Britannica defines a
cowcatcher as “an inclined frame on the front of a railroad locomotive for
throwing obstacles off the track.”
The Cowcatcher was
invented by Charles Babbage (