“This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door….”
Auden’s famous poem provided the commentary for a GPO film that I probably first saw in our blacked-out geography room at school during a
meeting of the railway society. It wasn’t the first railway poem to be set to the beat of a moving train. Robert Louis Stevenson’s “From
a Railway Carriage” had employed the same technique.
The Great Central Railway’s demonstration mail train is always
a highlight at gala days. The picture shows Oliver Cromwell blasting through
Quorn and Woodhouse in 2012 at the head of the GPO rake and about to collect
the mail bags from the lineside apparatus.
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