No trip to Washington, D.C. would be complete without a visit to one place: The Smithsonian National Postal Museum. You don’t have to be a philatelist to learn something new about the U.S. Postal Service, though it doesn’t hurt. It’s even a welcoming place for car enthusiasts as there are a surprisingly large number of vehicles discussed or on display, including one that historians would like you to know kinda sucked.
The story earlier this week about postal employees falling in love with the Oshkosh-built Next Generational Delivery Vehicle (NGDV) reminded me that the first vehicle the USPS had built for mail delivery wasn’t quite such a success.
This story comes courtesy of my surprise visit to the National Postal Museum. I took an Amtrak train with my family to D.C.’s Union Station and it just so happens that the entrance to the museum is near the cab stand. As soon as my wife glimpsed the words “POSTAL MUSEUM” floating above a doric-columned entrance it was clear we couldn’t start our trip until we went inside.
My wife is a sucker for stamps and museums. She’s also patiently visited any number of car museums with me. Hence, I was in no position to say decline and, after some half-hearted efforts to delay until we dropped our bags at the hotel, I found myself dragging our luggage through the National Stamp Salon and the Gems of American Philately.
It was worth it. Downstairs, when you get away from the stamps, there’s all sorts of stuff to appeal to my kind of nerd.
The Original Postal Vehicle
Prior to WWII, mail delivery in the United States often happened on foot or, even, by horse. Even now, if someone says to you “mail carrier” you might picture a USPS employee in a blue uniform walking along a white picket fence.
While this was how the majority of mail was delivered, the postal service variously used cars in the pre-war period. For larger packages, the Post Office Department (as it was then called) ordered about 1,000 Ford Model A trucks with custom oak bodies in 1931. Various postal offices also used vehicles to deliver mail or groups of mail carriers.
None of this was standardized, however, and the Model T was more of a van used for larger packages and, according to the Smithsonian, not used for regular mail delivery. The Parcel Post Mail Truck, as it was sometimes known, was still the closest thing the Post Office Department had to an original postal vehicle and they served for a long time.
“The credit for the longevity of this vehicle goes to the drivers, and the U.S. Post Office mechanics and maintenance garagemen of those times,” according to Post Office mechanic Walter Kalavesky.
Many other vehicles were tried, including Sit or Stand Vans from the Twin Coach Company of Kent, Ohio, and the ZipVan but nothing stuck. With a booming post-war population and a rapid increase in mail delivery, the Post Office needed something that regular letter carriers were used. Enter the Mailster.
Three Wheels Are Better Than No Wheels
Recognizing that delivering the mail meant carrying sometimes thousands of letters and packages weighing hundreds of pounds, the Post Office Department realized that an employee with a wheeled conveyance of some kind could carry more mail and therefore reduce the number of trips back to the post office and increase efficiency without having to hire a lot more people.
That vehicle, which is arguably the first purpose-built postal vehicle in the United States, is called the Mailster. According to the Smithsonian, this was produced by many companies, including Studebaker and Cushman. Many of them seem to have been built by a California company called Westcoaster.
No matter who built them, they all featured a three-wheel design. Power came from a 7.5-horsepower, air-cooled motor located in the bench seat below the operator. These appear to be Onan-built opposed two-cylinder engines, which means that mail carriers were definitely revving their Onans on the job. Power was delivered to the rear wheels via a three-speed column shifter and the motor features an electric starter.
Most of the Mailsters I’ve seen have a fiberglass body with metal sliding doors, but at least one variant (the Cushman one) has an open cab with a roof but no doors. Even with fiberglass bodies, the metal-doored vehicles weighed a hefty 2,600 pounds.
Why You Don’t Test Vehicles In Miami
It’s a known thing as a journalist that a car launched in Miami with no track time is probably not the best-handling car. Miami generally has slow speeds, no turns, no bad weather, and is as flat as Russell Crowe in Les Miserables. For some reason, the Post Office Department decided to test the Mailster in South Florida.
The vehicles did well in the Miami trials, but that did not mean they did well everywhere. From the Smithsonian:
[T]heir success in that temperate climate and even terrain did not translate well to the rest of the nation. Vehicles could be immobilized in as little as three inches of snow. The three-wheel design left mailsters susceptible to tipping over if cornering over 25 miles per hour or if caught in a wind gust. One carrier even complained that his mailster was tipped over by a large dog.
I love the idea of a large dog seeing the Mailster and launching the thing over on its side.
These vehicles had more trouble than just dealing with snow. Even on flat terrain, they were a little sketchy to drive according to Old Cars Weekly:
With three tiny wheels and minimal horsepower, the drawbacks to the little three-wheelers were obvious. You had to be very careful going around corners, and you were helpless in snow and ice. At one point, the Post Office Department actually considered forcing their drivers to wear crash helmets. The Mailsters never earned a reputation for great reliability, either. Among their more common maladies were clutch issues, balky fuel pumps and broken front axles.
The Smithsonian also says that the gear shift levers had a tendency to fail under frequent use. The maximum cargo load is 500 pounds and the maximum safe speed is supposedly 35 mph, which must be terrifying.
At one point as much as a third of the Post Office fleet in the United States was made up of Mailsters, though they were eventually phased out in favor of Jeeps and, eventually, the purpose-built Gruman LLV.
In spite of the overall poor performance, the Mailsters are charming in their own way and do go on sale occasionally. If this is your brand of weird, a decent one can usually be had for a few grand.
Also, a warning: You can buy postcards and used stamps at the Postal Museum gift shop, but you cannot buy real stamps for some extremely confusing reason. It makes no sense.
I’m old enough to remember these things prowling my neighborhood. When the carrier would turn left at the end of our block, he’d would lean his torso out of the vehicle to help make the turn. Apparently, a seasoned driver.
All this info and no mention of what years they were in service?
Yay DC! I assume you’re going to check out the Bond Cars at the Spy Museum, but I hope you can make it to the Udvar-Hazy and the National Cryptological Museum (which requires a car ride but has nice docents and lots of good free chapbooks).
Nice.
I’ll allow your onanism if you’ll permit my term “philatio” as deriving sexual pleasure from licking stamps.
My buddy Phil would probably derive some pleasure from *being* licked, and he’s been single for a loooong time.
(No, I’m not suggesting you two hook up, just offering an alternative definition for your excellent portmanteau!)
But you are not saying no a hookup either…
Mrs. Hardigree is our kind of people. Is she spearheading an effort to create The Stamptopian, or has it been … canceled?
No, no, don’t get up. I’ll fire myself.
They also bought several thousand RHD AMC Ambassadors in the late ’60s, which I believe had their back seats deleted for parcel storage space
I wouldn’t mind finding one of those and buying it.
I thought that The Autopian was all in on small efficient vehicles that don’t use unnecessary resources….
“Because it’s exactly the sort of car that my time in the Changli has made me realize we need”….
I do like this little thing, but it gets an enormous amount of shade from The Smithsonian, which I find extremely amusing. I kinda wanna drive one.
It actually sounds similar to the Royal Mail’s experience with Reliant Supervans in the ’60s. They bought a small fleet for test purposes, expecting the fiberglass body and aluminum engine to give long service life, as well as being highly maneuverable and fuel efficient. Experience showed that they worked reasonably well in denser in-town routes with heavy traffic, but were terrible in the countryside, poor traction in wet and snow, they could tip over if loaded incorrectly and cornered at high speed, were incompatible with maintenance garages set up for 4 wheeled vehicles in terms of lifts and oil change pits, and the accessory heaters caused some of them to catch fire and burn completely. Carriers hated them and the whole thing was considered a total failure
Small efficient vehicles doesn’t really mean a standing height vehicle with a narrow track that can be tipped over by a whiff. Honestly, I doubt this vehicle was even particularly efficient because that engine would have been revved way too hard on any incline at all, and the lack of the ability to corner at speed means shedding even more kinetic energy all the time (which you eventually need to get back).
TBH, as much as people malign the post office EVs submitted, they make a ton of sense for the use case and should be magnificient improvements over the shockingly expensive (now 35 years later) to maintain LLV. The design ergonomics of package delivery (particularly that of not bending over much every time you enter a vehicle) places challenging constraints on all vehicle designs. I hope no one enters a conventional step truck thinking there has been no compromises for form.