Electric vehicles
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"The electric vehicle provides the best chance of meeting the future vehicle emission and noise demands in the most sensitive urban areas."
Mike Horlor, Head of Royal Mail Transport, in Postal Technology 1996
Photograph of Daimler electric mail van, 1899.
'Going green' is not a new concept for the postal service: The Post Office has experimented with electric vehicles for
over a hundred years.
When the adoption of motorised services was first suggested, electrically powered vans were first thought to be most suitable. Despite some successful trials the Post Office refused to commit themselves to the new technology.
With today's raised awareness of carbon emissions, electrically powered vans have been increasingly used in recent years. Prior to this, the greatest period of experimentation was both before and immediately following World War 2.
In addition to electric delivery vans, electric trucks
and tractors were used particularly for transporting mails to and from railway stations.
In August 1920 the purchase of 13 electric
battery trucks was authorised for conveying letter and parcel mails between the Birmingham
Sorting Office and the New Street Railway Station.
Use of these trucks increased in the 1930s. Their fate has been tied to the Post Office use of railways: in more recent years both have declined. The photograph above shows one such truck towing carts of mailbags at Chester station in the photograph below, from 1934.
The other successful use of electric vehicles was Pedestrian-controlled Electric Delivery Trucks (PEDT). Introduced in 1954, they reduced the strain on the delivery staff. The early PEDTs had a box body and were first used for parcel delivery work, then later on town letter deliveries. In 1978, there were 470 electric trucks on postal duties. The use of a smaller variant is currently being expanded across the country.
For a long time the slow speed of electric vehicles, particularly going uphill, was the main difficulty in using them for mail delivery operations. More recently, developments in design and efficiency mean that this is no longer the case.
Oxford was the test bed for another experiment with an electric vehicle: the Bradshaw Carryall. Proving useful for deliveries in the city centre, in 2006 three of these vans remain in regular use and are both practical and popular with their drivers. The installation of on-site wind generators for recharging the vehicles is being investigated to further reduce the impact on the environment.
Electric Bradshaw delivery van, with driver Ken Beahan. Oxford, March 2006.
As local authorities introduce increasingly stringent
restrictions on vehicle usage, or introduce congestion charges as in Central London, the lessons learnt from these alternative fuel vehicles will prove invaluable as the Royal Mail fleet evolves into the future.
