If you want lettering to be accurate, you must have good sharp photographs of both sides of the car taken on the same day. If you copy the lettering precisely, then you can recreate how that car looked on the day that photograph was taken. You cannot generalize about how that car or a similar car looked on any other day or in any other photograph.

For example, if you look at photographs of Key System buses, streetcars, and trains taken in the late 1930's, you can identify the work of three different painters. (Key System was the San Francisco East Bay transit company.) You can look at the photograph and say this was the work of painter #1, #2, or #3. The differences are subtle but obvious.

Then the car may have been in an accident that required repainting part of the body. A different painter may have done the touch up lettering. The result is that the car has different "fonts" on two ends or both sides.

The painters probably were working from pounce patterns or stencils for the basic letter shape and size; then they hand painted the rest.

Each painter will work a little differently. They take short cuts to speed up the process. These shortcuts modify the look of the letters. Letters that are hand painted very rarely are precise copies of a font that comes from printers type or from a computer.

Only when decals came into common use do you start to find identical lettering on different cars.

I would invite ayone who is rivet counting on lettering to try lettering himself.