Double Vereinsthaler (Southern Railway commemorative)

1857 — the very year the Vienna Coinage Treaty laid down a decimal common standard of thirty pieces from 500 grams of fine silver; this is a double thaler of that year. On the face, the emperor Franz Joseph; on the back, a locomotive and a steamship flanking a lighthouse, an image commemorating the completion of the Austrian Southern Railway. An age in which the customs union and the railways stitched markets together and a monetary agreement held that stitching up. Few silver coins carry so literally the mid-19th-century fact that when the rails are joined, the money is joined. A piece worth remembering from the age of a common Austro-German currency.