The font on the diesels of the Norfolk and Western to me carry less design style then the font lettering on the tenders and sideskirts of the steam locomotives on the Norfolk and Western. Does anyone know what this font is, and is it downloadable from somewhere?

Thanks in advance.

This needs a bit more elaboration. Most lettering on railroad equipment, unless it was done by a graphics design firm in the last three or so decades, is not a "font" as we understand the term today. The lettering used on equipment was designed by the road's mechanical department and defined as a series of drawings for stencils and placement. Often (usually) the entire alphabet was never created, just those letters needed for the railroad name.

Mr. Coifman's Railfonts offerings start with this basic material, to which Mr. Coifman has added characters to complete the alphabet, and applied "kerning". Kerning is the differing distance between pairs of characters that gives a line of type its pleasing look, and may be a different amount of space for different pairs. It also may NOT be what the railroad used on their equipment.

Railfonts are a valuable resource for both modelers and preservationists, and are a lot of fun to use in the newsletter. However, it must be understood that these are not the exact same characters or spacing that the railroad used, and lacking the actual lettering drawings, photos should be used to confirm both the shape of the letters and their spacing.

WabashCannonball1522 -

I would think that your best bet would be to contact the Norfolk & Western Historical Society who probably has font style and sizes in their N&W archives. Our C&O Kanawha had the incorrect fonts in both the lamp boxes (at the top of the 2-8-4's boiler) and in the headlights. Jeff Kehler of the C&O Historical Society, after a long search in their archives, was able to furnish the correct fonts for both. The photo below shows the correct font as applied into the lamp boxes. The headlights still have the incorrect fonts, but those will eventually be changed too.

Les

From what I know and can see Railfont doesn't appear to offer a Norfolk & Western font of any kind on the online store from what I can see. An as a note all the Norfolk & Western fonts were custom drafted by N&W and not based on any readily available font. Trust me we run into this all the time in Roanoke when lettering former Norfolk & Western equipment on the 1:1 scale. My best bet would be to try the Norfolk & Western Historical Society as they have drawings of the fonts depending on what application you wanting for example sounds like you interested in early diesels as compared to the steam locomotive tender or cab lettering. The N&W Archives should be able to asset in providing a drawing showing the correct dimensions of the lettering that you’re interested in. Now I know you’re looking for a font that you can down load that is correct, that I don't think is available.

N&W Historical Society Web page:
http://www.nwhs.org/

We wanted to adopt the classic Capital Transit script for use on our letterhead. I worked with a caligrapher who discovered the original script was hand designed as noted in the quote above. She pointed out several inconsistencies where the same lettered appeared more than once, and then created our new design, also by hand. For some reason the "N" is clipped when I captured the file.

Wesley

I can't speak highly enough about the work the N&W society is doing with their drawing collection. A lot of it is scanned, much of what is scanned is also shown as thumbnail images on their web site so you know what you are getting. Ordering is easy, prices are reasonable, and if they haven't gotten around to scanning it yet, they might do a search for you and make it available.'' Here is a direct link to the archives page:

http://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/

Here is a link to a sample thumbnail:

http://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=21874

One word of warning... resist the temptation to enlarge the lettering from placement drawings, often titled "Stenciling". While today we can pretty much assume that an image of the real lettering was re-sized and added to another drawing to show placement, in the years before CAD drafting, such was not the case. Drawings of numerals and letterforms were usually done full size to facilitate making stencils; placement drawings were drawn at 1:12 or 1:24 size, and the lettering had to be drawn at that scale. Some of the draftsmen were pretty good at hand lettering, so the representation looks pretty good, but it is NOT an accurate representation. If you want the true shape of the characters, you need to get the drawing that defines the characters.