History lesson: The US Post Office paid for and operated a system of rail cars that would pick up, sort and drop off mail, while rolling, along all the major rail routes, nationwide. The railroads added passenger cars and sold tickets as an extra. Without the mail cars, they wouldn't have seen a profit. As mail delivery and handling switched from trains to central sorting and truck delivery, passenger rail died.
Ther local post office would sort mail to either east or west bound, and hang the bag out for the express to hook on the fly. Postal workers aboard the mail car would sort, bag and drop off bags, again on the fly, as they passed through the stations. (Remember Bugs and Yosemite Sam?) It was a wonder of logistics, when the Feds were still servants instead of our masters...
The commies, whose tiny little brains have an off switch that auto-engages at the word "profit," have never understood this. Hence, "high speed rail."
Mail traffic and freight service paid for those 100 mph steam engines. The freight trains loaded with grain from the elevators in the Twin Cities were what turned a profit for the Milwaukee Road.
RPO certainly helped pay the bills but I seriously doubt that it was the reason RRs ran passenger service. For one thing the PO had to resort to using buses in the 30s because RRs were dropping passenger trains due to a lack of riders during the Depression. Had RPO been the driving financial factor the trains could have continued to run as a one car train.
“Mail traffic and freight service paid for those 100 mph steam engines. The freight trains loaded with grain from the elevators in the Twin Cities were what turned a profit for the Milwaukee Road.”
100 mph locomotives weren’t the greatest expense for a RR, high speed roadbed was. Mail couldn’t possibly cover the cost of either of them and grain shipments didn’t need them.
Railroads invested in improved roadbed and high speed locomotives for mainlines between major cities where they had high volumes of passenger traffic. RRs had a monopoly on travel in the first half of the 20th century. Cross country highways were primitive to non-existent and air travel barely existed. RRs made plenty of money on passenger service and when they didn’t they abandoned it.
RRs made enough money on passenger service to build grand union stations, to support Harvey Houses, to employ an army of Redcaps and porters, to modernize passenger cars.