Could today’s #stampoftheday be the unmade sequel to “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”

I ask because the plot of that delightfully goofy 1988 film turns (spoiler alert) on the villainous Judge Doom’s plan to have Cloverleaf Industries purchase and demolish the Red Car Trolley Line, which, in turn, would force people to drive on the freeway he plans to build in Toontown.

My proposed sequel would focus on how the post-war demise of intercity passenger rail service led to the replacement of “Railway Post Offices” (RPOs) with “Highway Post Offices,” facilities where mail was sorted while it was in transit. The first-day cover shown with this post marked the inauguration of this service between Columbus and Gallipoli, Ohio on December 1, 1950.

Roger Rabbit, particularly Cloverleaf Industries, was loosely based on National City Lines, a real-life General Motors front company that, along with two subsidiaries, gained control of privately-run but publicly-regulated streetcar companies in Los Angeles and at least 45 other cities. National and its affiliates replaced the streetcar lines with buses made by GM. This transition gave rise to an extraordinarily durable narrative that the buyout of streetcar lines was part of a GM-led conspiracy to eliminate competition to its cars and (perhaps) buses. Some historians have taken issue with this narrative, claiming that the streetcar lines were losing passengers and money and that buses represented a logical and cheaper way to provide public transit (a debate replicated in my contemporary disputes about whether to build rail lines or provide enhanced bus service).

The streetcar’s demise parallels the decline of the Rail Post Offices, which dated back to the 1860s. In their peak in the first part of the 20th century, RPOs were used on over 9,000 train routes covering more than 200,000 route miles in North America and were handling 93 percent of the nation’s non-local mail. Most of this service consisted of one or more cars at the head end of passenger trains. But many railways operated solid mail trains between major cities; that would often carry 300 tons of mail daily. (The connection between rail and the post office is why the main Farley Post Office building in New York City is located next to Pennsylvania Station and why it’s possible to contemplate turning the Farley building into a new, more elegant Penn Station).

As with streetcars, the rise of automobiles led to a slow demise in operations of passenger rail trains that the Post Office Department relied on to carry the mail. In response, the department began exploring providing the exact same service on buses. It put the first such bus into service in 1941 but then halted the program during World War II. (The first bus, at least, was not a GM vehicle; I don’t know about the latter ones.) After the war, the Post Office rapidly increased the bus service, establishing more than 130 routes by 1955. As the Highway Post Offices grew, the Railway Post Office shrank, though it continued to be important. Illustratively, in 1948, there were 794 RPO lines operating over 161,000 miles of railroad. By 1962 only 262 of those routes were still operating.

The buses operated much like the trains. Mail was brought onto the bus in bags that were either stored in the back or brought up to the front for processing. Clerks inside the buses sorted mail in transit just as Railway Mail Service clerks had done aboard trains. The interiors of these buses resembled Railway Post Offices–letter cases and the letter distributing table on one side and the paper distributing table and holders for mail sacks on the other. The rear section of the bus had about 640 cubic feet of space and could hold an average of 150 mail sacks.

It was, to say the least, a unique working environment. In an oral history done for the National Postal Museum, Ira Daniels, a former HPO clerk who worked Nashville, TN to Owensboro KY recalled: “some of the roads were very curvy. That was an adventure. You had to maintain your balance plus work the mail.” Robert Coleman, another HPO clerk similarly recalled, “The only thing I didn’t like about the Highway Post Office was when the roads were really bad and they had a contract driver driving that bus, and sometimes they, you know they weren’t too safe.”

The changing character of cities and of the mail itself eventually led to the death of both services. Business mail, once a small portion of all correspondence, had grown to 80 percent of the total volume of mail in 1963. Centralization of both business accounts and social centers highlighted mechanization problems in the system. By 1960, the Post Office was shifting to regional mail sorting centers and in 1963, acting on the recommendation of a presidentially appointed Advisory Board it adopted the Zip Code system for coding and sorting mail. These changes spelled the end for the Highway Post Office system, which ceased operations in 1974 and the Railway Post Office system which had its last run in 1977.

So here’s my idea for the movie sequel. Somehow the story should link the advent of the Zip Code and the demise of Highway and Railway Post Offices, with a massive conspiracy involving mail-in ballots, linked to a corrupt voting machine company tied to a dead Venezuelan ruler, all of it run out of a non-descript landscaping firm in Philadelphia. Think anyone would buy it?

Be well, stay safe, “maintain your balance,” fight for justice and work for peace.