The Canada Post tunnel opened in March 1959 and carried mail from the West Georgia Street building to Waterfront Station. By the mid-1960s it was obsolete. By 2013 it was gone.
When the main Post Office was built on West Georgia Street in the 1950s, it was the largest welded steel structure in the world. It was essentially a five-storey machine that covered an entire city block, wrapped in an International style exterior and capped with a rooftop helipad—which was used all of twice before someone did the math and figured that delivering mail by helicopter from the post office to Vancouver International Airport wasn’t a viable option.
From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
2,400 feet
Until 2013, when the building sold to BC Investment Management Corporation, there was a 732 metre (2,400 foot) tunnel that connected the post office to Waterfront Station. The tunnel, which cost $1.6 million, took five years to dig, ran under Dunsmuir Street to Richards Street, then along Richards and finally zigged left at West Cordova. The tunnel was outfitted with two conveyor belts to move the mail and maintained by engineers on bikes.
According to a Province story on opening day March 12, 1959 “conveyor belts will whiz mail bags through the near half-mile tunnel in nine minutes. The system can handle two-and-a-half tons of mail a minute on normal operation. The mile of belting is electronically controlled and connects with a distribution system within the post office building.”
obsolete by the ’60s:
Sadly, this engineering marvel quickly became obsolete. By the mid-1960s mail stopped arriving in bags by train and was instead transported in containers by truck. It stayed unused until 1975, when the machinery was removed and sold.
For the next few decades, the tunnel became a favourite for film shoots (including 1980s movies Cold Front, a thriller starring Martin Sheen, and Friday the 13th Part V111) as well as some rocking Halloween parties.
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