- Transcontinental airmail route arrows locations generator#
- Transcontinental airmail route arrows locations series#
They were given 30 days to travel coast to coast.Īs danger involved in transporting mail and people on stagecoaches was high, the services were grounded and replaced by the Pony Express service. The movies show the stagecoaches travelling on long, lonely and sometimes dangerous routes. Those familiar with the great western and cowboy movies would know about them.
The first was the stagecoach mail service. Given this background, two forms of transporting mail sprung up in the United States. There was a growing need to speed up the process of transporting mail from one end of the continent to the other. The trip across the North American continent was dangerous and arduous and usually taking up to six weeks at a time. This resulted in what is now known as the Gold Rush from the east to west. The need for such a system arose after the discovery of gold in 1848 in California. Backgroundĭue to the absence of law in the land, the coast-to-coast overland mail delivery system was nonexistent in North America. To know what these concrete arrows are and what their purpose was, we need to take a peek into the past. They also played a major role in delivering mail across the continent between New York and San Francisco covering a distance of 4,139 km.Īt the peak of the air postal service, there were 1,500 concrete arrows across the country. Just about 99 years ago, the 70-ft long concrete arrows played a significant role in the history of Transcontinental Airway System. Each one of them would be pointing in a particular direction. Today, if any history aficionado walks about places like Albuquerque in New Mexico or Cheyenne in Wyoming, United States, they can find some puzzling concrete arrows. But they’re still out there.A former Transcontinental Air Mail Route Beacon in St. Their yellow paint is gone, their concrete cracks a little more with every winter frost, and no one crosses their path much, except for coyotes and tumbleweeds. The steel towers were torn down and went to the war effort. New advances in communication and navigation technology made the big arrows obsolete, and the Commerce Department decommissioned the beacons in the 1940s. Radio and radar are, of course, infinitely less cool than a concrete Yellow Brick Road from sea to shining sea, but I think we all know how this story ends.
Transcontinental airmail route arrows locations generator#
(A generator shed at the tail of each arrow powered the beacon.) Now mail could get from the Atlantic to the Pacific not in a matter of weeks, but in just 30 hours or so. Each arrow would be surmounted by a 51-foot steel tower and lit by a million-candlepower rotating beacon.
Every ten miles, pilots would pass a bright yellow concrete arrow.
Transcontinental airmail route arrows locations series#
The Postal Service solved the problem with the world’s first ground-based civilian navigation system: a series of lit beacons that would extend from New York to San Francisco. This meant that flying in bad weather was difficult, and night flying was just about impossible. There were no good aviation charts in those days, so pilots had to eyeball their way across the country using landmarks. On August 20, 1920, the United States opened its first coast-to-coast airmail delivery route, just 60 years after the Pony Express closed up shop. What are these giant arrows? Some kind of surveying mark? Landing beacons for flying saucers? Earth’s turn signals? No, it's… Quote Every so often, usually in the vast deserts of the American Southwest, a hiker or a backpacker will run across something puzzling: a ginormous concrete arrow, as much as seventy feet in length, just sitting in the middle of scrub-covered nowhere.
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