When It Absolutely, Positively Had to Be There In a Week or So

Railroads have always been good at shipping large amounts of cargo. But a problem arose when a shipper had to send less than a boxcar full of stuff (roughly 70,000 cubic feet or 50 tons). Small shipments went with a number of other shipments in a boxcar loaded with "less than carload lot" (LCL) shipments. Every time LCL shipments went from one railroad onto another, the LCL boxcars had to be unloaded and then reloaded onto other boxcars heading in the right direction. The delays could be lengthy and the risk of theft from LCL shipments was not insignificant.

That was unsatisfactory for high-value shipments. Express companies sprang up, even before railroads, to transport important cargo. In the early days, it would be by courier. Express companies made arrangements with stage coach companies to carry their shipments. That transferred over to railroads; the express companies paid for special handling and, by the end of the 19th Century, it was possible (for a price) to ship stuff from the West Coast to the East Coast in a week or so.

The problem was that there were a lot of express companies. During the First World War, the Federal government found it unsatisfactory to deal with all of those companies, so the Feds forced them to merge into one company: American Railway Express Agency, later just Railway Express Agency or REA.

REA, unlike the Post Office, shipped everything. During World War II, the Army's Manhattan project shipped radioactive materials by REA. REA was large enough that it had its own freight cars, in addition to shipping stuff in the baggage cars of passenger trains. REA's freight cars were hitched to passenger trains for priority handling. From the end of World War I into the 1950s, if you had stuff to send that had to get there in a few days, you sent it by REA.

REA tried to survive the decline of passenger trains and the rise of the Interstate highways and airlines by negotiating deals so REA could also ship by truck and air. But it did not. REA halted freight service by passenger rail in 1969 and went out of business completely in 1975.

(Federal Express, for what it is worth, began operations in 1971.)