Tulsa Railway Express Agency

    The Railway Express Agency was a rail express service, and at one time, the only one in the United States. It was the cargo company of choice in its day. Owned by the railroads, the REA had an arrangement whereby the railroads moved the cars and provided free terminal space. The REA paid its own expenses and divided the profit among the railroads in proportion to the traffic.

Unlike today’s shipping companies like UPS and FedEx, the REA enjoyed a monopoly sanctioned by the government after WWI and had to take everything including explosives. It was saddled with a lot of undesirable traffic that truck lines would not handle. There was practically nothing that was not handled at one time or another, including race horses and circus animals