Covering the wedding… by train

For the marriage of the Prince of Wales in 1981 you would of course expect some great Welsh covers, and amongst these you would want the Welsh railways to be included, writes Brian Austin. The Festiniog Railway did not let us down with this cover illustrated with a special royal love spoon, and it also features the nameplates of the actual locomotives ‘Prince and Princess’.

This cover is also a double first day, as it is the first day of the 20p Railway Letter stamp as well as the two Wedding stamps. The railway chose to use the Caernarfon special FDI postmark rather than sponsor their own, so making it more of a ‘semiofficial’, but you will know I am a fan of these covers which use local FDI or Royal Mail postmarks.

So is the Railway Royal Wedding theme a big collecting area? Well there were certainly covers produced for the North Yorkshire Moors and Talyllyn Railways, so that would give you a start, but there may be more out there. The tricky part with all of these is finding the pair of Royal Weddings stamps (for a FDC collector) rather than a single stamp (more for the railway collector).

Other special covers using FDI postmarks for this issue include a Kings Lynn FDI postmark on the Sandringham House cover or

Gloucestershire on Highgrove House.

At this point I should also mention again the 1969 Investiture of the Prince of Wales Festiniog Railway cover which is one of my favourites. On this there are numerous different combinations of stamps and postmarks, if anyone has any original advertising for this issue I would be very interested in seeing it to try and find out why so many different combinations were done.