Grimsby Evening Telegraph Jan 14th 1977

How pieces of string helped speed your post

The changing face of Grimsby's landscape has kept the towns Head Post Office heavily congested on one of its longest planning exercises ever.

Since the Post Office last reviewed its delivery network 900 houses have been demolished and 2,200 built - an easy situation to adapt to if the new development is confined to the town centre. But that is far from the case.

In recent years the rehousing programme has meant the birth of the Willows Estate on the outskirts of the town and in total an increase of 3,700 in the number of delivery points throughout the whole of Grimsby.

What is needed is more time and money for the service, neither of which is available.

The only weapon the Post Office has in combating its problem is the expertise of its planning department whose job it is to deploy postmen as

economically as possible - and that's a task which has taken nine months to complete in Grimsby's latest revision programme which comes to an end this weekend.

Cut by 10

It's 13 years since Grimsby's postal delivery network was as looked at closely and since then the postmen's beat has eaten further and further into the suburbs. Before the massive revision exercise began it took 86 rounds to service every letter-box in the area, but the work crammed into the past nine months by the four-strong planning team has cut this to 76.

The whole project has been governed by the budget which the two- tier postal charge system affords the national service. It was promised that charges should not be increased until at least March and so raising more revenue was out of the question. The whole meticulous operation began with a work study of every single round in the Grimsby postal area.

Supervisors from the sorting office accompanied each postman on his round for a week at the end of which the average time taken for the round. The average time taken for each street and the average number of items delivered on both first and second deliveries was noted.

This system was repeated on all of the 86 rounds until a complete log of time and effort for every street was compiled. Using this data the job of cramrning the work-load from 86 rounds into 76 began, using a

massive wall map and plottmg the routes with string.

With unions

Head of the planning team Mr. Marden Ward then explained how they had to work very closely with the unions on the project. "No round has to exceed more than two and a half hours, starting .at 7 am, and so the time taken on both first and second deliveries and that used for preparing the delivery after the sorting stage all have to be totted up when we plan the new routes."

The number of hours each day has to be carefully monitored so as not to exceed the weekly total which postmen put in. There is quite an art to the actual plotting of the routes. Team member Mr. Sam Smith explained: "We start with a piece of string four miles long (according to the 25in. to one mile scale of course) and the idea is to plot a route and leave as much string spare at the end of the round as possible. "Sometimes we all had a go at an area to see who could find the best possible route'. At the same time as rerouting the team have also introduced safety measures into the rounds like planning the route down one side of a major road and returning down another to avoid constant crossing of the road.

Pilot schemes

The success of their efforts has been immense. Pilot schemes. using the new routes, have been operated to great effect and the whole postal network has been condensed in terms of numbers of rounds without extending the time needed to carry out the job. The weekend ahead promises to be a hectic time for the planning team, because at 6 am on Saturday the big switch takes place. "As soon as all the overnight mail has been dealt with in the sorting office, work will break off at 6 am, and then we have to work like mad to adapt the sorting office, with new names on boxes. etc., as quickly as possible to avoid any long delays" explained Mr. Ward.

Signs on letter boxes, advising customers of new collection times have to be fixed and the whole system has to be brought up to date within a very short time.

"I would ask people just to bear with us for a time until any early snags with the new system are ironed out. There may be problems but we will sort them out as soon as possible." said Mr. Ward. One of the major changes in preparation for the time all mail will go to Doncaster for sorting, is that foot delivery men will not collect from boxes on their rounds in Grimsby in future. This is to ensure that the same service Grimsby offers, through its own sorting, can be maintained by Doncaster from January 31, and to do this early collection and dispatch is essential.

So a system of collection by vans will be introduced on return from delivering mail to large businesses. shops. etc. As well as performing the essential task of overall reorganisation the nine month exercise has come up with some fascinating facts which perhaps the public should bear in mind if they find their mailarriving five minutes late one morning and start cursing the service

In an average week theGrimsby Post Office handles 275,000 items of mail anddelivers to 36,286 points in the area.

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