Map of Remikra, 1206
Article Written: 11 June 1451
The Combrian Air Postal System was established on 1 January 1201 and provided a faster means for mail transit and package delivery across the nation's broad and expanding territory. Although carrying messages and cargo by air was not a new concept, the Combrian Postal System was the first in Circlaria to be funded and administered by a territorial government.
Structure and Function
The Combrian Air Postal System proved convenient in that it involved Postal Stations with special metal frame towers for various Estates. Some of these towers still stand today, although only as relics. On a regular schedule, an airship would moor at one of these towers, pitch a tent over it, and do two things: collect packages tied to special balloons released up through the tent and collected at the port into the air vessel, and send packages down rail-lined chutes attached to the tower back down to the Postal Station. Similar stops existed in the main district of each Municipality with the exception that each Municipality Postal Station had roughly two or three of these towers to handle Postal airships traveling from town-to-town within the County. At each town serving as the County Seat stood about five or six of these towers handling traffic from County-to-County within the District. At each District capital stood roughly ten or eleven towers handling mail traveling across the nation.
Each Postal hierarchy, whether for the District, the County, or the Municipality had couriers who trafficked mail between the towers and residences via trucks and vans. Residents wishing to send a package would call for paid stamps to place on the items they wished to send, and a courier would pick them up and put them through the system.
Issues
Although it was efficient, the Combrian Air Postal System was not without its mishaps. For example, in 1235, future-Prime-Minister Edward Jackson, at the age of eighteen, had accidentally released a large number of package-balloons into one of the towers, thinking that there was already an airship there to collect them. In reality, there was not, and scores of packages drifted out over the countryside. Many of these packages were recovered but not all of them; and some of them were believed to have fallen into the Inland Sea.
Many of the tents would also occasionally get damaged either from wear-and-tear or logistical mishaps. In 1221, one of the tents in the District of Nintel caught fire as the result of a lightning strike. All of the postal workers on the ground were able to evacuate, but six airship crew members lost their lives.
The most common issue was chute jams, especially with more packages than expected being released up to the airship. In 1236, one of the towers in South Masonia faced a record 147 packages jamming the top. Operations were halted as it took workers seventeen hours to finally clear the jam.
Nevertheless, the Air Postal System continued to serve Middle Remikra until the Retunian Revolution.
Obsoletion
Having developed from an underground system of communication in the early days of the Revolution, the Retunian Postal System utilized completely different channels of communication with certain people assigned as "couriers." Known as the "courier system," initially, the Retunian system involved transporting mail and packages along with passenger transit. Such a method remained after the War in the early 1240s and proved the basis for the Retunian Federal Postal System, which proved more efficient by having different and more efficient modes of transit: by transporting mail via trams between estates, via vans between municipalities, via airship between counties, via cable trains between Provinces, and via airships when shipping internationally or between national domains overseas. Loading mail onto and off of transporting vessels involved a simple conveyor belt system. The rise of the Retunian Postal System combined with the loss of territory for the Chartered State of Combria, as it occupied no more than the immediate territory surrounding the Diamond District of Hasphitat, led to the quick demise of the Combrian Air Postal System. Nevertheless, a few relics exist to this day, and the Air Postal System of the past is a figment of wonder for the present-day.