Matthew’s Mail Rail post is a job that keeps delivering
Matthew Frost moved to London in the 1990s and pursued a career in IT. But for the past year, he’s spent most of his days deep beneath the city, at the controls of a small electric train.
Matthew, 51, is a driver-controller on the Post Office Underground Railway, or Mail Rail for short. Opened in 1927, the narrow-gauge railway once moved tonnes of mail between London’s sorting offices via a 6.5-mile track set 70 feet below the capital’s crowded streets.
Mail Rail was shut down in 2003. By then, the volume of traditional mail had declined sharply with the advent of email, texting and instant messaging. The little underground railway had simply become too expensive to run.
Then, in 2017, a section of the Mail Rail track was re-opened as part of the Postal Museum, an attraction housed in the old Mount Pleasant sorting office in central London. Its development was supported by funding made possible by National Lottery players. When visitor numbers plummeted during the pandemic, The National Lottery stepped in again, helping offset the impact of lost ticket sales with £250,000 of funding.
Matthew, who became a fulltime driver-controller at the Postal Museum in December 2023, now spends his days taking visitors on rides around a 1km looped section of the Mail Rail track.
As someone who specialised in building email systems during his time in the IT sector, he admits it’s a little ironic he’s become a Mail Rail driver. Matthew said, “I do tell people that I probably contributed to the decline of the postal system via my work on email systems! If you’d told me 29 years ago when I first came to London that I’d end up driving on the Post Office Underground Railway, I wouldn’t have believed you.”
To be fair, Matthew does have a longstanding interest in underground railways. While living in London he became fascinated with disused Underground stations and even helped build an app which describes each one and the reasons it closed. When he left his IT job, he worked as a guide at another National Lottery-funded attraction, the London Transport Museum.
To become a driver-controller at The Postal Museum requires hours of training and both practical and written examinations. The little locomotives aren’t fast – the top speed is about 10km an hour – but as well as slowing and stopping at stations, the driver must control an audio system that explains items of interest to passengers.
Matthew enjoys chatting to visitors as much as he enjoys driving the trains. He said, “When people get off the ride they have all sorts of questions. There’s lots of engagement with the public.”
All in all, he seems to have found his perfect occupation. He said, “It’s what I’d describe as a tell-me-more job. Why wouldn’t you want to drive a train on this little narrow gauge underground railway and tell people about its history?”
3rd April 2025
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