It's that time of the year again when letterboxes and postbags start to fill with cards of good cheer.
And while they may not be dependent on them today, the comprehensive postal services we take for granted, and the 'tradition' of the Christmas Card, were only made possible by the establishment of national and transcontinental rail routes. The needs of the postal service gave rise in turn to many specialist vehicles which would have been especially hard worked in the lead up to the festive season. They also provided the prototypes for many a toy and model. Who has not had or wanted a postal van or similar on their layout? And they could make a reasonably-sized (and priced) present too!
Very topically then (and nice and early for Christmas) TCS member Fred van der Lubbe has produced yet another pf his fascinating books based round photos of models in his collection, this time featuring models of Travelling (or Railway) Post Offices, entitled simply TPORPO. As in previous books there are many beautiful scale models of these coaches, but also plenty of toy versions as well.
It is now available, free to download, in PDF format. To do so click on this icon 
to go to the TCS Document Folder and then download the file TPORPOsmall.pdf. It is also available as a larger file TPORPOlarge.pdf. The difference between the two (apart from the size) is that the picture quality is better in the large version. The small version is perfectly adequate for reading on-line, but if you wanted to print out a copy for your personal delectation then you might want to use the large version.
Many thanks to Fred for sharing all this with us.
The TCS Document Folder has been added to the site to hold files, such as these, which are too large to be held on the main site.
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