The post office and its story an interesting account of the activities of a great government department

There is something quite tragic in the fact that at the very time when travelling by road had reached its perfection in this country as regards speed and punctuality, a new force was at work which was to overthrow the mail coach not gradually, but within a few years. On the introduction of the railway in any district the coach service collapsed almost immediately as a medium for carrying the mails. And the great main roads of the country were for thirty years or more almost abandoned except by the local traffic in the districts which they passed through. Telford, the great engineer, had only recently reconstructed the magnificent road which runs from Shrewsbury to Holyhead, which was to be the means of beating all records in the speeding up of the Irish mail, but the railway gave it the appearance of a white elephant. For a long time grass could be seen growing in places in the centre of the road. “The calamity of railways has fallen upon us,” said Macadam, the great engineer of the main roads. There was undoubtedly an appeal to the spirit of romance and adventure in early Post Office methods. De Quincey tells us that when travelling by train to York he was not personally aware that he had been going forty or fifty miles an hour. But on a coach he knew he was going at a rollicking speed: “the sensibility of the horse uttering itself in the maniac light in his eye: we heard our speed: we saw it: we felt it as a thrilling, and this speed was not the product of blind insensate agencies.”