Last saturday evening (19th June 2010) me and sean were on msn. We both came up with the idea of testing the royal mail on how long a letter takes to go from one place to another. As we all know sean lives on the Isle of Barra , a pretty isolated place out in the outer herbrides. This made it even more intresting , how long would it take? 1 day , maybe 1 month? , lol. On saturday evening i hand wrote a letter (yeah pretty messy) and popped it away in the post box up the road , via 1st Class Royal Mail (aka put a 1st class stamp on it , lol). It got collected at 5.30pm on Monday 21st June 2010 and started it's pretty big journey towards the western isles. Me and sean have been discussing its route and we think this was it's probable path.
Monday Evening :
At 5.30pm it departed the post box up the road en-route to haddington post office , it's first leg. Later on in the evening it left haddington post office to go to the huge sorting office at edinburgh (we know this cos the envelope was stamped in edinburgh). During the night , probably early hours of the 22nd , it left edinburgh airport to travel to inverness (happened in top gear episode when they raced a letter).
Tuesday :
We think it spent most of Tuesday in the Inverness sorting office before going on another plane journey to benbecula.
Wednesday :
Its likely it travelled by ferry to barra on wednesday , before being taken to castlebay post office. At 1.50pm on Wednesday 23rd June 2010 it arrived at sean's house , after a mamoth journey including 2 flights and a ferry ride.
After this sean typed up a reply to see how long it would take to reach me. He posted it on Thursday Evening and it was collected at 8.30am yesterday morning. It then travelled to barra airport (it's on a beach!!
) and took off in a twin otter plane to land at glasgow for 12.50pm. It then travelled along the M8 motorway to the edinburgh sorting office. In the early hours of this morning it probably travelled by truck or van to my post office and arrived here at 9.35am this morning.
It was an incredibly intresting experiment to conduct with sean and we both thoroughly enjoyed it. Its intresting to see how the royal mail works and they do one hell of a good job!
Times (1st class) :
Haddington to Isle of Barra (1 day , 20 hours and 20 mins)
Isle of Barra to Haddington (1 day , 1 hour and 5 mins)
Our next experiment is to send them via 2nd Class and time them.
Hope you enjoyed reading this!
Pics :
My Letter at Sean's House
https://2img.net/h/i247.photobucket.com/albums/gg127/calum93_2008/IMG_0015.jpgSeans Letter at My House (sorry it's blurry!)
https://2img.net/h/i247.photobucket.com/albums/gg127/calum93_2008/Pics52008.jpgSpeical thanks go to :
The Royal Mail for the safe delivery of our letters
Sean , for taking part in this
Innes and Sean for signing the letter , i like the signatures!
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Calum