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Please note that we did not originally intend to retain this listing on our website for very long. It was originally intended as a short-term, quickly-compiled reference. Over the years we have added a few items to the article but the format of the article does not lend itself well to this. The result is a patchwork, untidy page but we have opted to retain it, rather than delete it, since it may be helpful to anyone collecting in this field.
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We had through our hands an extensive collection of around 200 Railway Workers' Widows & Orphans charity stamps from turn-of-the-century Austria. As none of these stamps seem to be commonplace, we decided to provide a list of those we handled, purely for information. The stamps exist Perf 9½ and / or Perf 11½, with the same design and colour sometimes being found in both perfs; this is particularly true of the ultramarine and fairly frequently true of the deep purple.
In our listing below, the stamps we have seen were Perf 9½ unless otherwise stated. In the table, we have used the short forms P9 and P11 to indicate the perforations. The colours given in the table heading below needed to be shortened and are simplified. Actual colours :
** Rose-Red, Ultramarine and Deep Purple are broadly accurate.
** Chestnut covers a range from pale terracotta to brown. In some cases, we have seen the two extremes of this range for the same station and these cases are mentioned in footnotes. For collectors seeking more information, we have favoured illustrating the brown stamps in the scans at the foot of the page as a further aid.
** Green is actually a dull grey-green
** Grey covers shades from almost black to a brownish-grey
The scans at the foot of the page illustrate every station design that we have handled or, occasionally, where we have come across a scan. The quality of printing of these stamps is generally not very good and it is sometimes difficult to make out detail of the designs, but ALL the designs are of railway stations, either interior or, more frequently, exterior, the latter showing trams from time to time. They are by no means all Austrian stations, with much of the European mainland represented, plus some USA and one from India. We believe the source material for the stamps came predominantly (perhaps entirely) from contemporary postcards.
We suspect there will be several more stations and no doubt more colour types for the designs we have listed, but perhaps no completely new colours. Current town names (and their countries) are often given by us below, although at the time many of the stations were, of course, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
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Initially, we were not planning on extending or maintaining this article, but have chosen to do so for a while. Additional scans, below, are new stations added to the list over time and as they came in; they are not in alphabetical order.
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For the updating of this article, we should like to thank Adolf Kuchynka from the Czech Republic for kindly providing us with evidence of the existence of one or two new designs and several additonal colours for a number of these stamps.
This list was last updated on May 30th, 2020.
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