CHARLESTON, Ill. (AP) — Amanda Gaston learned Saturday that delivering mail on trains more than half a century ago was anything but snail mail.

The Eastern Illinois University elementary education major was working with retired railway postal clerk John Liszewski of Dubois on Saturday during a multi-media education project about railroad history in Illinois and how to use first-hand accounts for teaching. That is how she learned that mail could reach destinations the same day while postal clerks rode the tracks.

'John told me how he might send money in the mail to his brother at 2 p.m. and that check arrived on a train by 8 o'clock that night,' said Gaston, an Eastern senior from Belleville. 'I was told the postal clerks on the trains were dedicated to accuracy and being on time. I learned a train once speeded up to 120 mph to make sure the mail was not late. The mail delivery on trains back then was definitely not slow.'

The mail cars were not just going from Point A to Point B, either. There were dozens of pickup points along the line when train transportation connected most of the country. Postal clerks government, not railroad, employees working the tracks had to have an encyclopedic memory, said Charleston resident Bob Moody, who worked the mail cars along the old New York Central Railroad lines from 1948-67.

'The westbound trains went all the way to Texas and you had to learn the towns in all those states along the route. We would be tested on routing them. There were 100 names you were tested on and you had to score 97 percent to pass. I think all the guys scored 100,' said Moody, who joined other postal railway clerks to have some of his memories videotaped for an upcoming WEIU-TV documentary in May on this aspect of rail history.

Victor Ingram of Charleston has fond memories of the many whistlestops when he was part of the crew in a mail car on the New York Central from 1948-59. Unfortunately, some of the towns and even the railroad tracks are only memories now.

The former New York Central right of way between Charleston and Mattoon is now a bike and fitness path with the tracks ripped up during the early 1980s. Many railroad lines have disappeared elsewhere as the railroads declined.

That is why Ingram wanted to help share the history of his old career. Several clerks brought memorabilia, ranging from old maps to publications, fold-out mail filing cabinets and badges.

'It's been so many years now that the kids from back then are adults. And many of them have not even heard of what we did with the mail,' Ingram said.

And a new generation of teachers could benefit from the clerks' shared knowledge. Gaston was one of several education majors interviewing the clerks or gaining background on the memorabilia brought to Buzzard Hall on Saturday.

'Our hope is that this experience will inspire these future teachers to engage students with oral histories and primary sources, not only through those already available at places like the Library of Congress, but to create their own,' said Cindy Rich of the EIU education department, who specializes in teaching the use of primary or 'first-hand' accounts to explain the past or connect with other disciplines like science, math and English.

What the traveling clerks did was sort mail and packages, drop it off and pick up mail, many times on fast-moving postal coaches 60 feet long, or half-mail, half-baggage rail cars. The pickups might be made at quick stops along the route with mail trucked to a train station. Or hanging leather mail pouches were collected with catch-arm devices. Sometimes those high-speed collections might misfire, as Moody recalled from one night at Fountainhead near Terre Haute, Ind.

'The catch arm ripped off and broke windows,' said Moody, who blamed the mishap on an anxious postal clerk at that location.

And trains used to carry more than mail for special delivery as Moody and some co-workers realized when they completed a poker game during some down time in a baggage car headed on an eastbound trip. The container they used for a makeshift poker table caused them to be red-faced at the end of the line.

'It was carrying a corpse. We didn't know it contained a body,' Moody said.

Their jobs had an underlying life-or-death element as well. Postal clerks on trains carried revolvers as an old film showed and confirmed by a vintage federal pamphlet on display Saturday. As federal employees for the former Postal Department, the railway clerks were trained in firearm use. The title of the publication was 'Use and Care of Revolvers.'

'In the old days a lot of thieves robbed trains for the payrolls they were carrying. But I wasn't involved in any robberies,' said Ron Kesterson of Effingham, who worked in the 1960s as a clerk on mail trains along the Illinois Central connections that ran from northeastern Illinois at Gilman down to St. Louis. He remembers the long work days more than anything else.

'You'd start out at dawn and get done after dark. It was a fast way to get the mail out. It was an experience but like most jobs you're glad when it's over.'

Rich, who has railroading roots in her family, said the contributions of the railway postal clerks are invaluable for capturing a part of local and national history, including the hands-on materials that will be recorded for digitized collections at Eastern. Some of it might end up in national collections as well, including the Smithsonian Institute.

'The last mail trains were 40 years ago. We were shocked when all this stuff showed up. And the individual interviews are so valuable. Without this we might have lost this history,' she said.