Bradshaw
Well into the 1950s folks across south Louisiana – and the nation – watched anxiously this time of year not for a white FedEx truck or a big brown UPS van, but for a green truck with a bright red diamond on its side.
That was the Railway Express Agency truck that delivered the things you’d ordered from the three-inch-thick Sears Roebuck or Montgomery Ward catalog. Between the two World Wars, it was practically the only way to get catalog orders sent to you or for you to send your Christmas package to Uncle Joe and Aunt Maude in Milwaukee.
The company was formed by the federal government during World War I to consolidate shipping, particularly of war material, but it quickly spread to other things. By the 1930s it had offices in practically every town that had a railroad depot.
One of its advertisements in the 1940s claimed there were 23,000 Railway Express offices in the United States, and one in 1942 said the agency’s 13,000 trucks made it the largest fleet in the United States.
Bradshaw
All of those trucks, fittingly sporting the green and red Christmas colors, were needed this time of year. As the Christmas season began in 1935, Railway Express agent C. F. Melebeck told the Abbeville Meridional, that Americans would spend nearly three billion dollars for yuletide gifts that year. He urged people to shop and ship early.
“Holiday shipments will be picked up or delivered to any address in the corporate area [of Abbeville],” the Meridional reported. “A telephone call to the Express Agency will bring a pick-up express vehicle.”
That was the policy in every depot town. In Crowley the service area had recently been expanded to include some addresses just outside of town. In 1931, the Eunice News praised Railway Express service that added to the general prosperity of the community, but it also had an axe to grind.
Railway Express was a non-profit corporation owned by a consortium of the major railroads. It usually operated at a deficit, but the railroads made up the difference because they had no other practical way to get a package from the depot to a doorstep. In 1931, the agency began defraying some of its annual loss by selling advertising space on the sides of its trucks. That’s what touched a nerve in the Eunice News offices.
“The Railway Express … has gone into advertising, thereby attacking the source of revenue of the newspapers,” the News said in a 1931 editorial. “All advertising is good, but such advertising as proposed by this railway express agency cannot be onetenth as productive as newspaper advertising, which goes into the home of the family, and is read by every member.”
Competing with the newspaper was not the way for the railroads that owned the express agency to make money, in the view of the News. “We emphatically declare [that they should] stay out of other business fields.”
Part of the reason for its regular deficit was that, even during the holiday rush, Railway Express guaranteed a delivery anywhere in the country within five days and seldom failed to keep that promise. That required manpower, overtime pay, and lots of gasoline for that big fleet of trucks.
The owner railroads began to feel the pinch in the 1950s, when airplanes and automobiles began to eat away at their passenger traffic, and big trucks began to compete for the freight and packages that sustained Railway Express.
In 1965 the Missouri Pacific discontinued trains that served Railway Express in Eunice “as well as other communities along its route adjacent to U.S. Highway 190,” and the agency had to use trucks rather than freight cars to haul goods to those communities from central depots in Houston and New Orleans. That was a scenario soon seen when other railroads dropped other trains across south Louisiana.
The once ubiquitous Railroad Express Agency trucks continued to disappear until 1975, when the company went into bankruptcy and the courts ordered its liquidation. The dark green trucks became nothing but a memory after the sale of its last operating rights and equipment in 1979, but for more than half a century it had helped create memories in towns big and small, especially at Christmas.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at [email protected] or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
