WHEN THE POST OFFICE AND THE RAILWAYS PUT THEIR HEADS TOGETHER, THEN THINGS ARE SURE TO GET EXCITING.
The world of the railway is a popular theme in philately: many stamp collectors are railway enthusiasts – and vice versa. However, it did not take long to realise that an absolutely spectacular miniature sheet was needed to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Austrian Federal Railways.
The very material itself needed to be unusual, and upcycling was just the ticket. Experiments were carried out with a range of materials before ultimately selecting a recycled 2.1-millimetre-thick acrylic glass, the design to be printed as a mirror image on the back – just like in reverse glass painting.
Every stamp also comes with an additional tag that looks like a typical blue station sign with white lettering on a blue background, each one bearing the name of a station somewhere in Austria. As a result, there are more than a thousand different versions of this ÖBB miniature sheet.
The stamp itself always bears the same design, and like a typical stamp it also has the standard perforations – something that was made possible by using a high-precision laser to cut them out. The part with the “station sign” can be detached and then, thanks to the magnetic film on the back, stuck on somewhere
like a fridge, for example.
But that is not all, because the special highlight with this stamp is that it can even become a cinema: Using your smartphone, you can activate the NFC chip on the back of the stamp and launch an augmented reality animation. It shows a historic steam locomotive going into a tunnel and then emerging shortly afterwards as a modern electric train. In this way, stamps and the railway are combined in an amazing way in a tiny space. The production of the stamps and the digital component was carried out by Stampfinity.
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