James Drury

Take A 3D Tour Of The Mail Rail

Mail Rail, British Postal Museum & Archive from ScanLAB on Vimeo.

The Mail Rail is London's worst 'secret' railway, in as much as it's not a secret. It's just that only postal workers ever got to see inside the link which ran from Whitechapel to Paddington from 1927-2003. And a handful of lucky people, such as us.

All that will change when the British Postal Museum and Archives opens a new museum next year, including the opportunity to ride the railway. Before that though, some structural changes need to be made to the world's first driverless electrified railway, to make it accessible for the public.

Before the adaptations are made, the museum wants to create a permanent record of how it used to be, so it has commissioned 3D scanning and visualisation company ScanLab Projects to capture the transit system for posterity. You can see a fly-through in the video above, and stills in the gallery below.

What happens with all these images will depend on how much cash the museum can raise. Possible plans include a full 3D walk-through of hidden parts of the network, or an app that enables layers to be peeled away to see the original industrial detail beneath.