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Prior to the introduction of the GPO's mail coach service in 1784, the mail was conveyed by horse riders or mail cart on the longer routes out of London and on foot on some country services. The service was slow and vulnerable to attacks by armed robbers. In 1782 John Palmer of Bath put forward his scheme for conveying the mail by stage coach. Rejected in 1783 by the Postmasters General, a trial was finally approved in June 1784, with the support of William Pitt, Chancellor of the Exchequer. The experiment on the Bristol-Bath-London road in August 1784 was a success and Palmer began to organise further mail coach services in 1785. He was appointed Surveyor and Comptroller General of the Post Office in 1786 and presided over the expansion of the service throughout England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. By 1790 all the most important routes had been covered and many towns had a daily delivery and collection of mail by coach. The full scheme involved 42 mail coach routes.

The mail coach service was almost immediately affected by the arrival of the railways in the 1830s. The GPO quickly took advantage of this new and faster method of transport to replace the mail coaches. The last of the London based coaches ceased in 1846, although this method of conveyance continued for cross post services between some provincial towns until the 1850s. The last coach in the Midlands ran out of Manchester in 1858. Mail coaches lasted longest in those area which railways were slow to reach, such as Cornwall, Mid Wales, the Peak District and far North of Scotland. One of the last mail routes to be used, to Thurso in northern Scotland, ceased after the opening of the Highland Railway in 1874. In some remote parts of Scotland railways were never built and horse drawn carriage continued into the twentieth century, until replaced by motor vehicles.

Post Office experiments with motor transport began in the 1890s. Until the end of the First World War services were provided mainly by private contractors. In 1919 the Post Office introduced its own fleet of motor vehicles.