Would a RR owned baggage car have to have special interior features to be suitable to for use by the Railway Express Agency? Would those features be required whether or not a REA employee was accompanying the parcels? Did the baggage car have to have Railway Express Agency painted on its side?

During the first year or so of my employment (1965-67) I worked at a couple of B&O Agencies that handled REA Express. The shipments were moved on REA Trucks to/from a REA Distribution center where carloads were aggregated for furtherance to destination. One location would occasionally have an REA car set off on the Station Siding account 'heavy' inbound traffic to the ultimate customer. The Agent at that location made 4 to 5 times his B&O salary with his REA commissions. This was the 1965-66 neighborhood.

I have no specific details here, but having studied this a bit, I'll postulate that unlike the postal service, since REA was actually owned by the various railroads, that the specifics for cars was no where near as detailed as was for the postal service, but probably not far removed from those standards. Especially since the requirements for postal service would be an industry-wide standard.

I've gotten a lot more interested in REA stuff in the last few months, and am always interested in new material and information. It interests me in the details of how it all worked.

Best
Ken Miller

Yes. The AAR established standards for baggage cars used in interchange service. Baggage Express Messenger (BEM) cars had specific requirements to support a messenger. An overview of the requirements may be found in the The Official Register of Passenger Train Equipment.

A snippet view from Google Books may be accessed here: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Th ... 0messenger

I have found that there is little surviving documentation about the post-war interchange of express and LCL freight in baggage cars. This was an important element in the operation of passenger trains and terminals. If someone is aware of a source, please let me know.   

I've noticed on old photos of mail and express trains (especially on the B&O) the use of a lot of odd-looking single-door express cars that may have been REA cars that look like they might have been converted military coaches or sleepers. Anyone know about those cars?

A personal note; my father drove an over-the-road truck for REA in the early 1950s before he married, out of the Akron terminal, which went on to become part of the Quaker Square complex in the 1970s, and is now a conference center for the University of Akron.

If those odd cars had plated-over paired windows, end doors so you could pass between cars, steam and signal lines for passenger train use, and were about 50 feet long, they were WWII troop sleepers converted for REX use.

Phil Mulligan