Royal Mail - internal transit flows

[tiptoptaff]

Not sure if this is the right place, but it doesn't seem to fit anywhere else....

I'm sat watching the tracking info on my Special Delivery Parcel update (slow, slow night shift) and it's been collected and will now go from the Home Counties Mail Centre to the Cardiff Mail Centre.

I was wondering, how do they do that? Will there be a lorry that goes to Cardiff from HC? Or will it be transhipped via other mail centres? Same applies to most places. I know long distance stuff to/from Scotland goes by rail or plane.

I'm just curious to know how the RM logistics chain works. If anyone knows, that is.

Thanks all,
TTT

 

[mikeg]

Can't comment on the lorries/planes/trains side of things to a great extent. but there's a Yorkshire hub as well as Sheffield and Leeds MC for Yorkshire for example. Used to be far more mail centres.
Sometimes transported via other mail centres. Post to Scotland and the far South of England used to go via East Midlands Airport ('EMA Flyers') when I had my stint at the now defunct York mail centre. Nothing went by train anymore from there (or anywhere at the time) but the Newcastle to London post goes mainly by train to Willesden as can be seen on RTT. Whether it handles mail from other mail centres I'm not sure.

There was one cage for a route called SYRT that always puzzled me. That was to several mail centres in a row, presumably they were consolidated into one multi-drop? I was only a temp so never really got to know the ins and outs.

There's also sometimes separate mail centres for inbound and outbound post. For example Nottingham has its mail centre, and then there's the 'outhouse' at Derby, somewhere I didn't end up working at - but nearly did - instead ended up on a zero hours contract at a certain cinema owned by one of these greedy Americans and run with all the efficiency of Russian car production* (out of the frying pan and into the fire)

*Which is probably quite efficient, it was more like East German car production with a penny pinching side to it.