An Alpine journey along Swiss Railways

The society were delighted to welcome back a former speaker, Mr Norton Wragg, to give us another display, this time on Swiss Railways.

The display started with a range of early material, including covers and postcards with the names of the locations on postmarks, which continued up to 1880 after which the routes were numbered instead.

The first lines started in 1847 and were all smaller railways, on which there were two rates for inland post, local up to 10k, and national. Shortly after, town names were added to postal stationery to allow for accurate accounting of the revenues that were being charged and distributed from this postal service.

By 1880 CDS cancels arrived with route numbers on and Mr Wragg was able to show us a range of these. The main focus of the display was on mail using the Swiss mail system en route to somewhere in Switzerland, but there were also a range of covers going from Switzerland to other parts of Europe. Overall, the display was a great opportunity to show the distribution of mail both internally within Switzerland and externally around Europe, in the late 1880.

The society would like to thank Mr Wragg for his time and the vote of thanks was given my Malcolm Ridsdale.