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Travelling with the Post


By Marie Ørstedholm

In the middle of the 19th century new cheap modes of transport as well as improved roads enabled an increasing number of Danes to explore the world on the other side of the parish boundary. People started to travel for pleasure and the journey often took place by mail coaches.


Rumbling on the Mail Coach

With its monopoly on all conveyance of mail, parcels, and passengers on the main routes of the country, there was no way of getting round the Danish postal service when travelling in the 19th century. If you were not among the few who could travel by their own car, you would usually begin your journey at the nearest post yard from where the mail coaches departed. During the first decades of the century the possibilities of conveyance were limited: Better-heeled people could hire an "extra post". It was a closed or semi-closed spring cart with a coachman who would bring travellers to their destination at a fixed mileage. Less well-to-do people had no other alternative than joining the less expensive parcel post that would go by fixed routes and usually only once a week. Rumbling on stony, bumpy roads on the stiff and often open platforms of the parcel post was hardly a pleasant experience and it could even be forthrightly unhealthy when the Clerk of the Weather was in a fury. Travelling with the parcel post also meant that you would have to be prepared for long waiting hours on the road when the mail was handled at the post yards along the route. With good cause some travellers still chose to make use of "Shank’s mare" or to get a lift on a peasant’s carriage for some of the distance.

The Big Breakthrough

Ordinary Danes were spared the pleasures and hardships of travelling until the 1830’s. The preliminaries to a change came when the first stagecoaches appeared on the highways of Zealand in 1829. The stagecoach routes were operated by private hauliers who were granted permission by the postal service to maintain a regular service – usually outside the main routes – on the condition that they carried mail as well. Not only were the stagecoaches cheaper to travel with than the parcel post, they were also more comfortable as by request from the postal service they all had to be provided with springs under the seats. They soon acquired great importance to the mobility of especially people in the provinces and became the most used public means of transportation before the age of the railways. In 1832, the Zealand stagecoaches were conveying more than 10,000 passengers and the number increased to 16,000 already the following year. At that time the stagecoaches had also been introduced on the island of Funen and in Jutland and many ferries had started to adjust their sailing times according to the timetables of the stagecoaches. Before the end of the 1830’s stagecoaches were servicing even the remotest corners of the country.

Better Travelling

The early success of the stagecoaches speaks for itself about a big need of the population to get quicker, cheaper, and further around in the country by public transport; a need that had already been confirmed to the postal service on a small scale in 1828 when the mail steamer "Mercurius" was put into service on the Great Belt and soon became popular with other travellers than just those who were travelling with the post. The postal service then started to pursue the new possibilities of earnings provided by more organized regular traffic. Large 12-seater mail coaches were purchased and put into service – like the stagecoach routes – between Kiel and Altona in 1832 and between Copenhagen and Hamburg in 1834. Tickets for the mail coaches were for good reasons sold out from the beginning: To be able to travel through the country at reasonable prices – protected against all kinds of bad weather on a closed carriage with soft seats – was a luxury only a few people had dared dream about. That travelling became more comfortable is, however, not only due to more and better carriages on the roads, but very much also the fact that the roads were improved. The main routes were turned into broad arterial highways, and former rugged wheel tracks were to a wide extent replaced by passable roads.

A Dangerous Competitor

The rapid development of the conveyance of passengers in the 1830’s continued at an even higher speed during the following decade. In 1845, mail coaches were servicing all main routes of the country as well as a number of side routes whilst private stagecoaches took care of the many travellers outside these routes. Eventually, both the mail routes and the stagecoach routes got uniform carriages – most often 6-seater stagecoaches conveying letters and parcels as well as passengers. The postal service’s golden age as transport service reached its peak during the years 1862-63 with totally 175,500 travellers. After this time the postal service lost an increasing number of passengers to the cheap, more punctual, and much faster railways every year. When the last stagecoach routes were discontinued in 1912, the postal service’s days of glory as transport service were long gone by.

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