Posts Tagged ‘Add new tag’

Collectors stories 1

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

In 1962 the United States post office issued a stamp to honour the U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold. During the printing process one sheet got turned around so that the yellow printing was inverted.  A stamp collector, Leonard Sherman, spotted the error at his local Post Office and bought the whole sheet for $2, expecting to make a lot of money from it. When the Postmaster General heard about it he ordered another forty million stamps to be printed with the error so that the original sheet was worth no more than the correctly printed stamps.

World’s longest model railway

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

The world’s longest model railway is being built in Hamburg, Germany by twin brothers Gerrit and Frederick Braun who started work on it in 2000 and expect to have it finished by 2014.

It has 6 miles of track which they plan to increase to 12 miles by the time it is finished.  There are 700 trains with 10,000 carriages, 2800 buildings and 160,000 figures.  It runs around spectacular model scenery of United States, Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia with more countries to be added.  The scenery took 500,ooo hours to make.  The layout is so large that it requires 160 staff to show visitors around.

Looking around here would be enthralling for both big boys and little boys.