Philosateleia
Kevin Blackston
PO Box 217
Floresville TX 78114-0217
United States of America

Mailster quirky but ultimately flawed vehicle

A while back while browsing around looking for one thing or another, I ran across a blog post from the National Postal Museum regarding United States Post Office Department mailsters, three-wheeled delivery trucks that were mass-produced in the late 1950s and 1960s.

Mailsters could apparently fit into small spaces, and to my eye are pretty nifty looking vehicles. They had some flaws, however; as blog post author Nancy Pope points out, mailsters were “vehicles that could be immobilized by three inches of snow, tip over if driving around a corner more than 25 mph, caught in a wind gust, or even by large dogs jumping on them.

Continuing, Pope writes that the mailster was “a hotbed of flaws, including defective front axles, defective and inferior shaft linkage, defective drive couplings, defective universal joints, defective door locks, defective fuel pumps, and defective brake pedal mountings.” Not exactly the sort of thing you want to be relying on to carry you through your appointed rounds.

Fortunately for mail delivery, the Jeep was available to take over, and the mailster became a part of post office history.

Published 2015-07-14

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