Howard Piltz - Mainline Railway Stamps

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

Pen and Sword Transport

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire - Philadelphia

Copyright Howard Piltz, 2018

ISBN 9781473871908

eISBN 9781473871922

Mobi ISBN 9781473871915

The right of Howard Piltz to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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It is with great pleasure that I dedicate this book to my wonderful wife Christine who has been by my side for over 46 years and without whom I would never have been so happy.

And Chardi.

F or this second book in this series on public transport subjects featured on postage stamps, once again the author will combine two of his life long hobbies and look at the principal railways around the world.

For those that read the first book in this series, the following is very much a necessary repeat, setting the scene for the love of stamps and railways.

The two sides

Collecting stamps brings a wonderful new view of the world that the collector, celebrated in the more formal title of the philatelist, is led through an amazing world of knowledge, where the inquisitive mind can ponder some mysteries of bygone times. Why, you may ask, do British postage stamps never, but NEVER boast their country of origin, preferring instead to use an elegant bust of the current monarch such as the work of the celebrated artist and sculptor Arnold Machin O.B.E (1911-99) that has appeared on every British postage stamp for over 50 years? Or why Swiss stamps bear the enigmatic title Helvetia, and as if that isnt difficult enough, then where are some far-off lands that these days only appear in our history books? Go south a tad, one might be told, to find Southern Rhodesia, or for that matter just a little more thought might be needed to give us the answer for that evocative name Tanganyika.

Likewise, someone with a worldly interest in transport may find that the hobby will lead him or her all over the world, if not literally, then as a by-product of studying the subject. There are a great many transport professionals that have worked on several different continents throughout their working lives to bring the benefit of their skills to areas one might consider under-developed in the areas of public transport. Personally, the author has spent many years as an enthusiast of most forms of public transport and has been to places that until the advent of cheap air travel seemed quite outlandish. Whilst he has never been to Indonesia, he has read, enthralled, of the fire-breathing dragons that abounded there; however, he has been to a lake on Vancouver Island on Canadas Pacific coast where lived the worlds two largest flying boats regaling in the name of Mars , whilst it seemed to him at the time he was 14 quite exciting, but utterly easy in 1959, to talk himself onto the inaugural KLM Viscount flight from Manchester to Amsterdam only to find there was no return flight home that day (memories of the heart-clutching scream from his Dad over the phone will never fade: Youre WHERE?) or a flight, not much later but this time with permission and paid for to go plane-spotting alone to the Paris Air Show. Not many years later, he visited the USA to look for the last gasps of two iconic forms of American transport PCC trams in Newark, NJ, and the Pennsylvania Railroad GG1 electric locomotives. I could also go on a little too long about getting rather merry drinking the local brews in places like Prague, Lisbon or the countryside around Brussels whilst chasing trams.

At first sight, it might seem a little odd that one should wish to combine these two totally disparate hobbies, but by good fortune the author happens to have a liking for both subjects and a long time ago began to appreciate that in stamps one could find the wonderful combination of transport history told within a glorious gallery of miniature works of art. See through the ages how the reproduction techniques on stamps have developed from simple monochrome etchings such as this 1948 stamp from America.

Interestingly, apart from a very few definitives of the 1890s and 1900s, it was to be 1963 before a British stamp would appear with more than one colour; not even the UKs 1953 Coronation stamps boasted more. The accepted appearance developed first to two or three colours and then as with everything else towards the end of the twentieth century, convention went out of the window as we saw full colour art-work and the use of photographs and, quite often in these days of digital photography, fairly heavily manipulated ones at that.

Whats in this collection?

There will be several different formats that the reader will find mentioned in this book, and there follows a brief summary for the novice philatelist:

Mint stamps : unused stamps, un-marked on their face and with the gum on the back still intact. It used to be the habit of collectors to stick gummed, paper hinges to the back of their stamps for mounting in an album. The damage that this does for serious collectors has discredited this practice and one will often find these days the initials MNH (Mint, not hinged) within the description of a particular stamp or set of stamps.

Used stamps : As the terminology states, postage stamps that have been used for the purpose they were designed for, indicating that the due fee for the service required has been paid, and stuck on the envelope or parcel as proof. Hence they bear a post-mark (sometimes referred to as a franking or cancellation) to indicate the office of cancellation and will undoubtedly have no gum on the back but traces of the paper they had been stuck to. Apart from its rarity value, a collector will look for how heavy the post-mark appears on the stamp and how well the backing has been removed, a thinning of the stamp itself or loss of any part of the face or the perforations will render the stamp valueless, scrap, or where it is a particularly rare example seriously devalued.