Adjacent industry · not a surviving city post
Hospitals, warehouses, casinos, and a shrinking number of bank drive-throughs still shoot carriers through pipes. That is a living manufacturing sector with vendors, RFID, and laboratory-validation papers — a separate industry from the closed city postal networks.
The National Postal Museum, even while writing about historic city mail, already separated the surviving uses: large stores, hospitals, and banks. Wikipedia’s pneumatic-tube article treats hospital PTS as its own subsection — specimen transport, pharmacy unit-dose, automated handover to pre-analytical lines — with a warning that laboratories validate systems locally because haemolysis and analyte effects vary.
Vendors (Swisslog/Translogic, Pevco, Sumetzberger, Aerocom, and others) sell computer-controlled networks with priority rules, station access control, and tracking. Wikipedia summarises modern small-bore systems as reaching speeds of around 7.5 metres per second, citing a 2010 Stanford Medicine news piece on hospital sample transport.
A 1953 Lamson mail can and a 2017 hospital pod share a pressure gradient. They do not share a tariff, a postmaster, or a street franchise.
Where the pipes still go
Documented living uses, distinct from city postal dates.
Ward and emergency department to central lab; pharmacy to ward. Weight, duration, and acceleration limits matter because blood is not a letter. Six-inch bores are discussed in the literature for heavy IV bags versus four-inch lines.
Department-store tube rooms and supermarket cash carriers are a twentieth-century cousin. Bank drive-through tubes still exist; many have been pulled as mobile apps and ATMs took the transaction.
The CIA’s Original Headquarters Building used a Lamson system — more than 30 miles of 4-inch steel tubing, about 150 stations, 1962–1989 — described on the Agency’s own artifact page. NASA Mission Control had console tubes. Steel plants have sent hot samples. Those are building systems, not municipal post.
