Font of all knowledge?

[robert3985]

If he can do a bunch of those, I would be up for a set! What do you say?
Henry

I shall keep you in mind   

[sirenwerks]

Font design is an art unto itself and most railroads, pre-1970 at least, had their own fonts designed that you won't find in a publicly available font catalog.  Many fonts are copyrighted and font designers respect this, so when you find a CC-licensed "close-enough" it's going to be just that, and maybe not even that.  Take, for instance, this the freely available font called California Zephyr - http://www.ffonts.net/California-Zephyr.font.  Outwardly it has the feel of the Burlington font, but a simple comparison of the letter C of the original will show you just how far off it is.  And even if you get a real close enough, you'll need to adjust the kerning (I've heard it called morticing too), baseline/ascender/descender heights, and other aspects most likely.

[C855B]

... the kerning (I've heard it called morticing too) ...

It hasn't been called "mortising" since foundry type days, so whoever your authority was on that is using an antiquated term (>50 years old), my guess is probably for effect. Or it may be living on as a regionalism. You're right, though, it is the same thing. It was called mortising because you would actually put type in a saw and undercut the lead supporting part of the letter, and the resulting overhang would then be supported by the slug it was adjacent to, in order to tighten the inter-character spacing.

Most shops discouraged mortising because it made the mortised character unusable for anything else. Also, the mortised character would frequently break if you took too many impressions. It was primarily used for display ad work where the end result was going to be litho production (or gravure). You were then printing one or two copies on a proof press, using a clay-coated slick stock which would then go to a paste-up artist for assembly into the finished artwork. From that point it would go to a camera to make the negative for plate production.

[sirenwerks]

I think Prof. Lipinski was post-60 and that was more than 20 years ago.  Not to mention he was from Communist Poland, which may have been further behind the times in terminology.

Personally, I like to do physical paste up now and then and miss those massive stat cameras.  A scanner is just not the same...

[pnolan48]

Truly appreciate all the knowledge that goes into fonts, and recognizing them. I too have been in the graphics arts for nearly 50 years. I did find that a stretched Palatino bold, caps and lower caps, kinda sorta matched PRR locos and passenger cars, as long as I modified a number of letters. I no longer remember what I did to each letter, but the work was fairly extensive. I ended up with individually drawn letters that were not really combined into a font, but were scalable. Might be better to just buy the font!

[randgust]

I was surprised to see the individual letters for all ATSF station signs - drawn out in detail - in one of the Santa Fe System Standards books by Kachina press.  It's not really a font, but if you were a building painter and had to put signs up, there was NO QUESTION as to how big, wide, dimensions, everything, each letter had to be.   So while it's not really a 'font', if you have all the dimensions of each letter and how they are to be formed as an alphabet, it certainly is where fonts come from.   

Not sure if anybody else but ATSF had system standards that included sign painting and the alphabet, but they did.

[C855B]

... Not sure if anybody else but ATSF had system standards that included sign painting and the alphabet, but they did.

I know SP and UP did because I have run across the standards in my travels. PRR undoubtedly had very specific signage specs, too.

But, generally speaking, I would think that most RRs had well-documented architectural, signage and equipment (signals, for instance) specifications. It's all part of what we now call "trade dress", the overall image that a company presents to its customers. "Brand recognition", basically.