Eliyahu Brunnengraber was born in Poland in 1922. He joined the Red Army when the Second World War broke out, and served as a locomotive driver for armoured trains.

After making Aliyah to Israel in 1949 he began working as a locomotive driver for Israel Railways, a job he liked very much. In 1978 he was injured badly in a car accident on his way to work, in which two of his colleagues perished. He had to quit his beloved profession but following his recovery he returned to work as a locomotive driving instructor.

After retirement, Eliyahu continued working and then volunteering as the manager of the Israel Railway Museum, which opened in 1983.

Eliyahu had many hobbies and collections, the main one being the collection of stamps of a single theme, trains and railways. He spent decades collecting railway-themed stamps from around the world, buying and exchanging then with fellow collectors here and abroad.

Eliyahu and his friends also campaigned to develop this field of Israeli philately and donated from his personal collection to the Israel Railway Museum. He had various other railway-themed collections such as postcards, first-day envelopes, postmarks, photographs and artistic renderings of locomotives he prepared from old watchmaking parts.

The late Eliyahu Brunnengraber's unique stamp collection is one of the world's largest stamp collections devoted solely to the railway theme. He spent decades collecting all the stamps on display, which reflect the ever changing world and its railways.

A postage stamp is a little piece of paper stuck on an envelope, indicating to the postal authorities that payment was made for carriage of the item to its destination.

Stamp collecting was a widespread and well known hobby at one time. Collectors from around the world exchanged or purchased stamps. The value of these stamps was determined by their importance, their rarity or the motifs appearing on them.

This collection includes single stamps carrying subject related in some way to railways as well as stamp series issued for special occasions or periods. There are also groups of stamps which have the same design but different colours, denoting different denominations.

Eliyahu's collection is displayed here for the first time publicly. The Museum staff chose a small selection of stamps to represent its vast diversity in origin, subject and colour.

The complete collection includes tens of thousands of stamps originating from nearly every country in the world, include some which do not exist anymore, are that were controlled by a world power before independence.

The stamps are from various periods from the 19th Century to the early 21st Century. Their subjects include locomotive, carriages and wagons, track and tools, signals, stations, tunnels, maps, railway workers and engineers etc.

The railway connection is not always apparent at first glance, so many stamps are worth a closer look.

The display in this wagon is dedicated to railway stamps from around the world. Israeli stamps and other railway-related collections are presented in the adjacent wagon.

The collections were all donated to The Israel Railway Museum by the family of the late Eliyahu Brunnengraber.