How does a letter mailed from the States to Canada get stamped in Budapest is beyond me. Despite the longer route, the letter made it to me in 10 days.
Why there is a locomotive image on the stamp is another enigma.
Can you make out the date in the straight-line, dot-matrix New Orleans cancellation?
I would want to see a correlation between that date and the date in the Budapest cancellation, 11 06. 07. Otherwise, I might suspect that the sender put it on there as a novelty.
And, it seems to me that USPS-applied barcodes typically encode domestic destinations. 299 is the country code for Azerbaijan, a LONG way from Budapest!
But, I would still presume that the culprit for the misdirection is the barcode. I've seen this before - mail misdirected because the operator typed in the wrong zipcode, causing an erroneous barcode to be applied.
-Paul
PS, the eastern terminus of the Orient Express is Budapest!
Any chance the letter was routed through Budapest Georgia? Budapest is a small unincorporated community in Haralson County in the U.S. state of Georgia.
Robert, I just received from you the same type envelope. The stamp on the back seems being applied by a Custom Border Officer (passport stamp). This is not a postal stamp. The date is: June 11, 2007, time 3.00 PM. It shows that the "person" left Budapest, Hungary by train.
There are two possibilities:
1. If it is real, it was applied on envelopes by the Officer at the request of the traveler on many envelopes at that time, or he changed the date on the device used for this purpose; for him/her it did not matter anyhow, being applied on a piece of paper and not on the passport;
2. If it is a "fake" it is very well executed. My guess is that it seems to be real and an Officer friend of the person did it.
Postal value: ZERO!
See the link: