I read a story once of somebody sending a postcard from one part of the country to the other end saying that they planned to catch a train in a couple of hours, and would the recipient please meet them at the other end, etc. - the expectation is the card would get there in plenty of time before the sender themselves.

It's hard to believe. Whenever I mention this story to people and say it was all for the cost of a penny (the penny post being introduced in 1840), people say that back then a penny was worth so much more, we were able to invest in the infrastructure.

According to inflation calculators, 1p in 1840 is worth about 96p today. It's about 1/3rd more than a 1st class stamp today, and of course most postage is now paid for by bulk carriers (advertising), which is even cheaper.

There's some interesting stories to find in the economics of the UK postal system over the last 182 years...

[1] is a timetable for Sutton Coldfield in 1902.

It seems fairly reasonable that you could send a letter to Birmingham and have it delivered within two hours + travel time, but not to another part of the country unless you were lucky with the timings.

Remember, it was usually possible to post a letter from a station, which presumably gave it a very good chance of being on the next train.

[1] http://www.sutton-coldfield.net/rail/1902%20train%20timetabl...

If your letter from London to Edinburgh was posted at Kings X at 0800, and sent on the 0830, it may have arrived in Edinburgh at 1530 and arrived at the office at 1600. The contents could be "I'm taking the 1000 train, meet me when it arrives at 1700"

If you were to then catch the 1000 train, arriving 1700, that would give the recipient time to get to Waverley in time for the arrival.

Top Gear once did a race where they dropped a letter in a box in the Isles of Scilly, addressed to a house in Orkney, then climbed into a Porsche and tried to beat the letter to its destination.

The letter got there first.

I imagine that some of that will be going to pay posties more, and provide better services for them. Whilst I hope a good deal of the back office is automated, there is still a great deal of manual work. Modern employees have a much better standard of living, and benefits than those in 1840, and cost more.

A "penny" might have meant an old penny, or 1/240 GBP.

It certainly would have done.

In 1840 average weekly wage for a skilled man in his 30s was £2 according to the first link on ddg. A penny post would be about 1/480th of a weekly wage. If we assume that a skilled man in his 30s today would earn £40k, that would put today's stamp in the £1.50 range, rather than 65p.

Far cheaper today, despite being pretty much meaningless. It's no wonder people "hacked" the system, this was a time before phones, or even telegrams, but a time when long distance commerce and connected economies were beginning to become established.

The founders of Crumpler bags originally started a letter delivery service in the Adelaide CBD, but they were shut down.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/small-business/partners-have...

England is only approximately 400x300 miles. That's tiny. I'm not really surprised mail could get anywhere in the same day.

Here in the US, you'd be lucky if 1) your letter to someone across the same city gets there in a day (not even same day, but 24hrs) and 2) if the USPS doesn't lose, destroy, or deliver it to the wrong address.

A couple of years ago I had some paperwork I had to mail from a Seattle suburb to the state capitol in Olympia. Thought it would be a good idea to pay $5 and send it express, "overnight". Express came with an SMS option, which I signed up for, so for the next week I was getting texts about how it had made another incremental hop from one warehouse to the next...

You do know that private delivery services intermingle heavily with USPS, right?

FedEx and UPS both use USPS services (a lot of "last mile" work), and also both provide services to USPS (contracts to carry mail by air).

I fail to see how that makes my previous comment invalid..

This is some really good context, so you could basically treat receiving letters like getting a very slow text message. Do you have an article or source regarding the post frequency?

I don't know about the UK but in France, big cities got 3 post deliveries per day at some point. I'm sure Paris got more at some point.