THE LATTER DAY FAST MAIL.

Once upon a time, the Post Office expedited first class mail by picking up and kicking off mail sacks on the fly.

Now comes Amazon, intending to automate the sorting and the delivery to your front porch.

Amazon patent application detail retrieved from Drone Life.

The full patent application includes details of the mechanized Railway Post Office in a container.

I suspect technology enthusiasts are making too much of the plans.

The idea is that the train does the long-haul travel, while the hubs would serve as repairing hubs for UAVs that launch from the train for local deliveries, and return for maintenance and further delivery pickups. It's quite clever, and evident of Amazon's strong focus on creating a powerful drone-delivery system of their own.

The publicly available patent calls these hubs "Ground-based mobile maintenance facilities for unmanned aerial vehicles" which "may be coupled to locomotives, container ships, road tractors or other vehicles, and equipped with systems for loading one or more items onto the aerial vehicle, and for launching or retrieving the aerial vehicle while the intermodal vehicles are in motion." This expands upon the idea of using railroad infrastructure and widens the concept to a far broader scope. Amazon is planning on finalizing not only the land and the air, but the sea, as well.

It makes sense—a container ship could launch deliveries before reaching the coast, as soon as it geographically makes sense to send UAVs off. There would be no waiting for the ship to dock or unload hundreds of containers with massive cranes. Amazon is clearly pressing forward with the concept of a nationwide system of drone delivery, and we'll surely hear of more such patents from them in the near future.

Yes, a container ship could launch at sea, if Amazon's special containers were all at the top of the above-decks stacks.

Read through, though, and contemplate the possibilities for rigorously timed train operations.

Instead of providing stationary warehouses to store frequently purchased items in populous areas, Amazon could use a system of moving warehouses and drone stations- launching a delivery drone when they are closest to the desired destination.

Presumably the factories are still fixed locations: will Amazon be integrating backwards? But in populated areas, perhaps you're updating something like this, with battery-powered streetcars or buses?

Perhaps my imagination isn't creative enough, but wouldn't the logistics be simpler if the mobile warehouses and metropolitan delivery vehicles were operating according to a set schedule?

It would require a sophisticated computing system to monitor and maintain the fleet, determine correct launching points, and determine “rendevous” points for the drones’ return.  The patent describes a “maintenance vehicle” which “comprises a plurality of batteries, at least one robotic arm and at least one system for launching an aerial vehicle or retrieving the aerial vehicle within a compartment of the first intermodal maintenance vehicle…”  The robotic arm, it seems, is to help change batteries.  The idea behind the patent is twofold: first that product might be stored in moving warehouses, and second that the delivery drones could be maintained and repaired in the same moving warehouse.  Using standard freight containers would allow the transportation method to change as appropriate.

Will each of these mobile warehouses be attended by a drone mechanic?

If you can contemplate delivering parcels in this way, you can also contemplate receiving parcels.

The patent points out also that the system could be engineered in reverse, to receive deliveries.  If successfully implemented and widely adopting, [c.q.] the idea of moving delivery stations could have an impact well beyond Amazon.

Yes, just as Railway Express and the Railway Post Office helped deliver manufactured goods to the hinterlands, a century ago.