The International Association of Amateur Heralds

Chris Green wrote:
The tree in the CoA is a strawberry tree. That can't be right I thought. Strawberries grow on bushes. But there is such a tree:

You learn much about the world from a stamp collection, they say. And now I see I learn as much from heraldry.

next: Hamburg, Cologne and Aachen, note that the coa of Aachen is quite different.

Also, Cologne's Coat of arms is not a semy of ermine, but eleven gouttes de sable (did I spell that right?) Interestingly the gouttes were a late addition and the coat of arms just had a field argent under the chief.

Just what the charges are supposed to be on the Cologne city arms seems not to be totally cut and dried. This page http://www.koeln-altstadt.de/kultur/koe ... index.html on the development of the arms says that the "droplets, flames, or tears represent [darstellen] ermine tails of an ermine pelt, from the old arms of Brittany." The source is the arms of Brittany, St. Ursula (whose legendary 11 or 11,000 virgin martyrs are symbolized by the black charges) being a daughter of the king of Brittany.

Here is the correct CoA of Aachen:



Why whoever designed the heraldry for Amsterdam station decided on red rather than gold (thus creating arms that might be OK in Albania but nowhere much else other than a Holywood movie) is a mystery.

could be a misinterpretation of these arms of 1888



or somebody read a blazon the wrong way.

last of the destinations: St. Petersburg, Vienna and Munich. Vienna is quite different.

Surely some mistake there. The arms of Vienna when Amsterdam station was built were:

Sadly even the arms of Munich are wrong. The gold should be silver:



Das Wappen der Stadt München zeigt in Silber einen Mönch mit goldgeränderter schwarzer Kutte und roten Schuhen, in der Linken ein rotes Eidbuch haltend, die Rechte zum Schwur erhoben.

The St Petersburg arms have the anchors in what appears to be vert rather than argent. The current version of the CoA looks like this:



All in all I am left with very mixed feelings about this collection. It was nice that back in the 19th century the railway company thought to use heraldry to brighten up its new station. But oh dear, whoever was charged with doing the research let them down. In his defence (for I guess it was probably a man) he did not have access to the internet of course, nor almost certainly to any books containing colour plates. Unfortunately he was no heraldry buff as he would otherwise have questioned some of the tinctures and would surely never have got Vienna wrong.

Thank you Ton for sharing these pictures with us.