Issue date: 14 Sep, 2018
25th Anniversary of the last Travelling Post Office
It feels as if 30 June 1993 was only yesterday, when the train carrying Spain’s last Travelling Post Office set out from Chamartín Station in Madrid, but twenty-five years have passed. Spanish philately commemorates the anniversary with this stamp, a homage to the service that once carried the country’s correspondence, and especially to the men (and some women) who made the arduous task possible, whatever the conditions.
Because from the beginning, when the first Travelling Post Offices began running between Madrid and Albacete in September 1855, the work of the Post Office employees was neither comfortable nor easy. Loading and unloading at stations, sorting correspondence in transit, official delivery at destinations over long nights of work accompanied by the incessant clattering of the train, when steam was the power that moved the world.
The postal carriages travelled millions of kilometres all over Spain; carriages with their own unique characteristics, changing over time, spreading the latest news wherever they went. Everyone is looking, sighing anxiously… anxiously sighing! How eagerly they gaze at the ugliest carriage! But the one they all want: the Post Office car! The satisfied train, seeking another village, moves off, whistles… in the poetic words of Froilán Cete, the pen-name of a travelling post office worker, in the Heraldo Postal of 1908.
The carriages were cold in winter, hot in summer, unhygienic, cramped, and dangerous - sometimes even leading to deaths. Over time, working conditions improved, as modern advances were added: electric light and heating, kitchens, bunks and showers transformed the interior design of the Post Office carriage.
Divided lives, parallel lives, friends and even lovers at every station, as in the song by Rafael de León: The dark swallows will return, to hang their nests on my balcony, but that Travelling Post Office worker, he will never come back...
But Correos brings it all back in a stamp, showing the exterior of a 1500 series Post Office carriage on the front, and on the back, the interior, where the Travelling Post Office, the mail sacks and equipment recreate a lost world.
Rate A - €0.75. For a “standard” letter or postcard within Spain, up to 20 g.
Rate A2 - €0.85. For a “standard” letter or postcard within Spain, between 20 g and 50 g.
Rate B - €1.65. For a “standard” Ordinary International letter or postcard addressed to Europe (including Greenland), up to 20 g.
Rate C - €1.75. For a “standard” Ordinary International letter or postcard addressed to the rest of the world (except USA, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand), up to 20 g.
Rate D - €2.10. For a “standard” Ordinary International letter or postcard addressed to the USA, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, up to 20 g.