Roland Perry writes:

In message

, at 16:23:21 on Wed, 12 Mar 2014, Recliner
remarked:
In 1970 I could post a letter at the main post office in Oxford up to
midnight and it would be delivered in South East London at breakfast time.

And now you can send an email, text, tweet, IM, DM, usenet post, etc,
usually for little or no charge, and have it delivered anywhere in the
world in seconds. With that sort of competition, no-one's going to pay for
the huge network of people, sorting offices and vans that would be needed
to maintain the old style of physical mail services, that delivered locally
in hours, from a previous era.

Vans? It was all bikes and Shank's pony. Even today a lot of postmen
buy their own cars and use those to get to their delivery patch
earlier, Royal Mail doesn't buy them vans. (Let's not get confused
with Parcelforce).

Royal Mail has several vans here, its the only way to deliver
efficiently to the rural area.

Phil