A while back there was a discussion about lettering railroad equipment, and how there are fonts close to the rail fonts on most computers, but none that are exactly right.

Well, I found the link below completely by accident. Wondering if what's there is of use to anybody.

Railroad Fonts
hkading@rypn.org

At the Illinois Railway Museum we try to take great care to reproduce faithful car lettering and stenciling. This takes many forms and we have gone so far as to creat 'font' drawings in Autocad in order to scale and plot them full size for patterns. We would be able to share those few efforts to those seriously interested. Does anyone know if Benn's fonts are able to be imported into Autocad and scaled to full size on a drawing? Or whether they can be compressed or stretched? Often a so called standard Railroad Roman is strectched or compressed to fit a single railroad's style or the space available on the side of a piece of equipment. While our sets are not keyed to a set of keyboard strokes they are eminently useful in creating full sized patterns.

Bob Kutella

68trolley@home.com

> A while back there was a discussion about
> lettering railroad equipment, and how there
> are fonts close to the rail fonts on most
> computers, but none that are exactly right.

> Well, I found the link below completely by
> accident. Wondering if what's there is of
> use to anybody.

Ask Benn. He's been active at a number of museums. Very talented guy...

Roger

pullman@privatecarservice.net

> Does anyone know
> if Benn's fonts are able to be imported into
> Autocad and scaled to full size on a
> drawing?

Hi, I am Benn's partner and maintain the railfonts.com site. There are two type of fonts in each package. One is true type and the other is postscript. I am not an Auto Cad guy, but what ever you can do with a normal post script / ATM type font, you can do with our fonts. This is true for both the PC and Mac versions.

Fell free to contact me at help@railfonts.com or Benn directly at: zephyr@railfonts.com

Regards,

Dan

ddawdy@ribbonrail.com

The fonts most defiantly work in autocad
you can scale Height and compress or extend the length.

Al P.

> Ask Benn. He's been active at a number of
> museums. Very talented guy...

> Roger


alp@cheshire.net

Strictly speaking, "font" is a typsetting term derived from the act of pouring the lead to cast the type figures. The lettering used on all railroad, bus, truck, airline, signs, etc aren't "fonts" but "lettering styles". Lettering in computer programs are "fonts". But if you take one and make a large version of it to apply to a railroad car or locomotive, it becomes a "lettering style". Until these font discussions appeared on the various discussion groups, I've never heard the term "font" applied to large scale railroad lettering, paticularly within the industry.

Except for things like the Pennsy and Pennsy controlled lines, the lettering style used by almost all US railroads is "Extended Railroad Roman", "extended" meaning "stretched out sideways" to fit an extremely wide and very short letterboard. The advent of the streamliners in the 1930s saw the introduction of "sans-serif Roman", usually called "Gothic" style lettering ("Helvetica" is the printer's term). Each railroad has it's own twists to Extended Roman; the SP, WP, and Santa Fe styles are not quite the same. The "Southern Pacific" used by SP on its locomotives until the introduction of the speed lettering is a good example of [non-extended] Railroad Roman lettering. Union Pacific uses Gothic style lettering.

All modern Roman lettering styles (from which all Roman style print fonts were derived) are based on the principles contained in Albrecht Durer's "Of the Just Shaping of Letters", in which he lays out the principles of proportion for the various parts of each letter: the size, ratio of wide strokes to narrow, width of the serifs, and the radius of the curve associated with a particular width serif.

This book is currently shown as on back order at Amazon.com, but that's not too bad seeing as how it was first published in 1535 (in Latin, the Amazon.com book is a translation).

As applied to the design of the letters, another word for "lettering style" is typeface. A book designer would describe a piece of printing as being set in a certain style of type.

I wish I could learn more about railroad typefaces. It has always been amazing to me that each early-20th-century railroad company devoted effort to developing its own lettering style, but that is clearly what they did, usually with considerable artistry. In the course of lettering equipment I've enjoyed learning the nuances of the Chesapeake and Ohio and Pere Marquette typefaces, which are attractive and quirky variations on standard Roman. The Pere Marquette face is especially interesting, with flamboyant, angled serifs and a completely original "Q." This face has been translated into a computerized font by, if I remember correctly, Cliff Vander Yacht of the PM Historical Society, by modifying an electronic Roman font.

Aarne H. Frobom
The Steam Railroading Institute
Michigan State Trust for Railway Preservation, Inc.
P. O. Box 665
Owosso, MI 48867-0665

froboma@mdot.state.mi.us

Getting just the proper lettering style is (to me at least), the thing that will make a restoration look right, or look "amateurish". It is jarring to see computer-cut Helvetica lettering on a 1937 hopper car, or "pretty close" computer generated Roman lettering on a boxcar or tender. 99% of our visitors (civilians) would not notice, but it is not "right".


hpincus@mindspring.com

I have not had the opportunity to check out the lettering styles (fonts) on the posted website, but I do know that the art of handlettering on rail equipment and other commercial work was a blend of the sign artist's technique and the railroad sample books and standards provided him. Even though much lettering in the latter part of the 20th century of rail equipment may have been accomplished by spray-painted stencils, before the advent of vinyl cut or screened lettering, the same design techniques apply. One great find I had at a used book store (I guess they are called "vintage" book stores now) was a copy of "The Sign Painting Course" by E.C. Matthews. While intended as a self-instruction book written in the 1950s, it is a great reference for the craft of hand-painted lettering techniques and materials and includes examples of lettering styles. The execution of these with hand-painted strokes often defined the exact nature of the style of lettering, something that cannot always be cranked out of a computer.

JMFouchard@aol.com

> The execution of these with hand-painted strokes
> often defined the exact nature of the style
> of lettering, something that cannot always
> be cranked out of a computer.

I couldn't agree more. My "favorite" is Cotton Belt Roman lettering, even the uniformly standard die-cut [Roman] reporting marks used on the freight cars. If you know what to look for, it's also easy to tell if the painter was right or left handed. Typefaces ("fonts") have many stylistic nuances which are difficult to render with a lettering brush. The master molds for fonts are (or rather "were") made by skilled technicians like tool and die makers.

For a good presentation on how railroads established their lettering styles, look in that book on the SP's Daylight. There is a section in the back showing the drawings of how the letters are generated. There is no scale specified on the drawings, just the square units of the overlying grid. This way you can use a 1 foot square, 1 inch square, or 1 cm square as a unit standard, and the lettering will all look the same, barring the slight imperfections of hand lettering of course.

On page 269 of the book on the PFE, there are two views of lettering wood stage-icers. In the close-up, if it isn't a posed publicity shot and the painter is actually working, he isn't painting the UP hearald; he's painting out the briges left by the stencil used to apply the white paint. That hose by his right leg is the paint sprayer. In the lower view, the square box around the UP enblem is the stencil for the black background. The car to the right has had the backgrounds of the hearalds painted. Once the black has dried (probably overnight), the white will be applied. Page 270 has a view showing the Gothic PFE name being applied to a mechanical. The Great Yellow Fleet doesn't show any shop pictures of painting cars.