Known as "Lineside Exchange Apparatus". And I believe nowhere on the old Southern had the necessary installations, which also meant that the TPO vehicles themselves were not fitted with the nets etc required for this - it was very usual for the TPO vehicles to be notably confined to one base or even one specific working for much of their lives.
There was one west of Taunton into the 1960s, on the Western Region, which was a much-desired (though rarely achieved) personal diversion of our family on summer evenings when it was still pleasantly daylight when the exchange took place. Notably, it all happened rather too fast to take in. Country road, park by the hedge, one postman in uniform and his red Morris Minor van there, very punctual speeding Up train, WHAM!!!
There were longstanding security arrangements around the mails, not so much about regular letters etc (which were often dumped unattended in mailbag piles at the end of Taunton station platform, particularly in the run-up to Christmas), but with the Special Category mail, Registered, etc. One of the principal users of this service was the banks, who moved all their paper money this way, new banknotes out to all the branches, old notes being withdrawn back to the Bank of England. This is what was behind the multi-million pound (even then) 1963 Great Train Robbery, which of course was on a London-bound service bringing the old mixed notes back for disposal, not the new, identifiable ones going the other way.
The number of sorters in a TPO was dependent on how long between stations and the typical mail volume - the more mail, and the shorter time to sort it, the more you needed. Typically there were several, in addition to the sorters there were those more junior who moved the mailbags around for them. Just one vehicle might be the sorting carriage, with those each side used just for bag stowage. The sorting pigeonholes were not named as such, just numbered, and got used for different points as the journey progressed, and I believe also that different sorters did it different ways, and then collated them appropriately at the end. If I recall correctly the coach with the Exchange Apparatus was not the sorting coach, but one of the adjacent stowage ones, as when the big door was slid open at speed just prior to the exchange, a real gale blew through the coach. The sorter at the door sounded an electric bell which rang through the postal vehicles just before the door was opened.
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