(erielack) Hoboken Mail

["vze3fhdr" <vze3fhdr_@_verizon.net>]

Here's yet more. Great day for doing this as its still raining, and there is a measurable amount of water in the basement.

    Sometime around 1953???, the DLW got a big mail contract, or did the Post Office decide that Hoboken was as good a place as any for a processing center? Maybe the mail facility in Hoboken was built temporarily until the facility in the meadows was complete????

    Anyway, the New York Society of Model Engineers had a big O scale and a small HO scale layout on the upper ferry concourse. They moved them out to construct a sorting facility there. There was also a smaller facility constructed at the end of where track 15 ended by the tugboat slip. 

    Just to give you an idea of the amount of vehicular traffic the DLW once carried, the entire wall in the plaza was all driveways to access the boats. In later years, like the early fifties, most of these entrances were closed up, and REA, Railway Express Agency parked their trucks there. With the coming of the mail, REA was moved up to a new location on Observer Highway. Most of the vehicular concourse was converted to mail handling. By this time, there wasn't much vehicular traffic for the boats, so they only loaded cars and trucks from the first 2 slips. Mail conveyors effectively blocked the bridges for the other slips. 

    The railroad moved so much mail during Christmas time, that I remember seeing box cars and on one occasion, a refer on the East end of track one, being loaded with mail. On another day, Fruehauf shipped a replacement door for a box trailer via rail.

    There were many ways they moved mail and other packages around the station. REA had these battery powered material trucks. There were steerable wheels at each end. The center was depressed. They also had battery powered tugs that pulled small trailers. The trailers had what looked like hook and loop couplers.

    The DLW had tugs like the ones REA had. The trailers had a deck height that matched the floor height of the baggage/mail cars. These trailers were assembled into trains that were ten units long. There also were platform trucks. These were battery powered as well, but unlike the REA trucks, the decks were straight, and they could pull trailers. The DLW also had one or two gas powered tugs. They also had a battery powered truck with a deck that could be raised. They used this one for heavy articles.

    Bill

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