National postal museum gears up for truck exhibit
At the Smithsonians National Postal Museum, located in Washington, DC, a new exhibition will soon showcase a cab-cutaway truck. Called Networking a Nation: Star Route Service, the exhibition will show how postal mail has traveled through our nation. Thanks to the addition of a Columbia cab-cutaway truck, donated by Freightliner Trucks (Portland, OR), museum visitors can sit inside the cab of a big-rig truck, which has played a powerful role in transporting mail. Various trucks have been used to haul mail on Star Routes, which were established more than 150 years ago to expand our nations mail service. Legislation that created the new mail service called for contractors to transport the mail with celerity, certainty, and security. Weary of repeatedly writing these words in ledgers, postal clerks substituted ***, and the phrase Star Route was born.