wagon fonts

[twiggy1969]

does anyone know what font was used for lettering and numbers on wagons 

 

thanks ,mark

[BMS]

Need more information; what period between say 1835 and 2017, type of wagons and possibly location; L&M, GWR, GNR, BR, TVR, LNER, DRS etc etc before a reasonable answer can be produced or are you creating a multi-volume book (;-))

[twiggy1969]

sorry as i had posted in the gwr section guessed ppl would presumed that was what i was after so yes GWR pre ww11 would be a good starting point

 

thanks mark

[Quarryscapes]

I modified fonts in order to make my transfers, there's nothing that is perfect right from the box so to speak. At least not that I'm aware of anyway. 

[twiggy1969]

yes its looking like i will be drawing each letter in cad

[davidbr]

It would be easier to take some photographs and work on them.  Tare, Load, various figures and the G and W can be cut out, scaled and printed.  Once you have a selection of letters, other words can be made.

 

I was speaking with a Gauge O modeller the other day and he had an A4 sheet of decals (waterside) made by Precision Labels.  He made his up in Word - the subject matter was WW1 military, not one of the common sets - and they dealt with them very quickly.

[jwealleans]

Another option is to obtain a sheet of something like the HMRS transfers and if they don't do the text you want, paste letters onto a black background, scan them and clean them up then assemble your own text. GIMP is a very good package for doing this.

 

I can highly recommend John Peck's bespoke service having made up my own lettering exactly as described above recently.

[twiggy1969]

ive ended up doing a trace from some good wagon photos and fairly happy with the results however on the 1st sheet didnt quite get the size right so ive just resized and printed a 2nd lot

 

also did some lettering  and made up some large  small and LMS for my cattle wagon rake

 

 

fairly happy so far

[twiggy1969]

happy with this

[The Fatadder]

Another option is to obtain a sheet of something like the HMRS transfers and if they don't do the text you want, paste letters onto a black background, scan them and clean them up then assemble your own text. GIMP is a very good package for doing this.

I like the idea, i need to make up some toad locations, and some 'return to xxx'

Will just need to get a clean set of transfers to work from

[57xx]

Did they use a font in the way you are meaning, as all the wagons lettering/numbering would have been hand painted on so not likely to be of a standard font at all. So if you are looking for a font on your computer etc there isn't much likely to find one the same.

 

Pre-computers, it would have been known as a typeface and a font was a specific weight, style and size of a particular typeface. Nowadays, the term font has been bastardised and used instead of/interchangeably with typeface. Even though everything was hand painted back then, it was still standardised and of a particular typeface. You may have found the odd variation here and there but they would have been exceptions to the rule.

[Penlan]

When putting together wording and numbers, don't forget you can also apply 'Scaling' to them, this expands / reduces their width.

On one of my old number plates - WSJ 455 - I ended up with 

Arial Black – Font 350, W scaled 66%, S scaled 85%, J scaled 90%, 4 & 5 scaled 90%.  Expanded Characters 20%  

 

The original 'W' was far to wide, but the 66% scaling reduced it to approx., looking right, I still had to tweak the letters though when painting the number plates.   I put a load of chalk on the back of the print, then used it like carbon paper to transfer the letter/number edges to the number plate, then of course just paint.

 

Of course I can't find the photo showing WSJ 455, but here's another one of mine CV 9998, top & bottom photo's are specific - the 2nd plate down was a 3rd party attempt - wrong - and the third one is the old plate from the 1960's.