Font for SNCF traditional station names

[Whitcan]

A quick question.  Does anyone know the best font to use to replicate the white on blue names painted on station buildings?

 

Any help gratefully received.

 

Regards

 

Paul

[ianp]

Get a decent picture (from a photo in a book or somewhere on the internet) and upload it to this website called Whatthefont: https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

It should tell you exactly the font/typeface, or suggest something very similar. My sister, who works in the TV graphics effects industry, uses it so it must be reasonably good. I have used it and it works. Here is a similar website though I haven't used it: https://www.whatfontis.com/

[jivebunny]

Hi Paul,

 

From the thread title I'm assuming it's the older style of sign you wish to replicate, in which case common suggestions are Eurostile or a narrow version of LinoType Univers 820 (both free).

 

They're not quite identical to the prototype but it's only really noticeable if you have the model and the real thing side-by-side, which is unlikely to happen unless you're displaying your layout in front of a preserved station in France

 

The real thing was designed to be easily replicated using only a ruler and a compass, if you want to try more traditional methods! (although I suppose you'll need a very small compass...)

 

Cheers,

 

Alan

[Pacific231G]

Hi Paul

These are enamel rather than painted signs

I spent quite some time trying to get this right for my own layouts and had a topic on it on the LocoRevue Forum.

http://forum.e-train.fr/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=46333

 

There is a typeface called police SNCF (in printing police or more fully police d'ecriture means typeface ) which is close to that used for carriage and wagon lettering before UIC markings were adopted. As Alan says, it is a very geometric "drawing office" face. The ttf file available for this is for point sizes 10-72 so is not quite right for signs which would be larger. I think it's actually the font used for printed documents such as timetables so some of the letter weightings would be a bit different for larger signs.  (Note that the "fonts" supplied for computers are infinitely scaleable but well designed typefaces do have differences in their fonts depending on the point size)

 

Comparing Police SNCF with actual station nameboards I did find certain letters, such as A,Y,S & U  to be noticeably different,  so I looked at other typefaces

This is the where I finally got to  for one particular nameboard which is probably an SNCF one .

Note  that the handling of subsidiary words like SUR varied.

 

Older station names could also be a bit different.

Heudreville was further north on the same line (Chartres-Rouen)  but its nameboard is much older, probably CF de l'Etat  and the letttering appears to have a drop shadow.

 

I think in the end I just used Police SNCF and mucked around with it in Paint Shop Pro- probably just to narrow it a bit .

I needed to use a graphics package in any case to get the border around the name and the colours right

For a deliberately vague location I think this is good enough and looks OK in situ - a lot better than the nameboards in Jouef's kit

For an actual location or area it would be worth finding some real examples to compare with available typefaces. 

 

The SNCF typeface is useful and you can download a copy from here 

http://ferroviblog.weebly.com/polices-deacutecritures.html

It's the third entry down and the ttf file is only 22k

 

Note that the signage used for linesides notices for drivers such as "G" (garage) or "PN24 200m" (level crossing 24 in 200 metres) or the plates on signal posts do seem to be rather different. The open S (sifflez) for "whistle" is particularly distinctive and unlike most other signs.

 

 

 

 

Edited October 10, 2019 by Pacific231G

[BernardTPM]

I found an entirely different (but very French, I think) style being used at Pihen (picture from 'Minder') and in the end simpy drew it out:

[Welchester]

Ah, Mortagne-sur-Sèvre: le Petit Train de Vendée.

[Pacific231G]

23 hours ago, Bishop of Welchester said:

Ah, Mortagne-sur-Sèvre: le Petit Train de Vendée.

Indeed. photographed when I took a trip behind their industrial 030T from there to Les Herbiers and back . 

I think Mortagne and many of the other had standard white on blue enamelled station signs that overlaid earlier ones, often carved into the stone.

I've seen a few of these with the letters filled in with blue or red paint but the carving produced very different letter shapes from the printed enamel signs.  Whether they were carved by hand or, more likely given their consistency, using a pantograph in a specialist shop. I don't know .

Here are some examples

 

Ligré-Rivière, the junction for the non SNCF Chinon-Richelieu line where it bifurcated from the SNCF's Chinon-Port de Piles branch.

Note that the carved signs have serif lettering. The lettering on the platform side of the buillding still shows trace of having been painted though it had faded almost to nothing when I took these photos.

You can still see the red paint on the closed station at La Flèche, once the centre of a gaggle of branch lines north west of Saumur and a rather important town to no longer have any railway connection.The carving is plainer than at Ligré-Rivière

Far more elaborate is the tile based carved lettering at Ecueille on the metre gauge Blanc-Argent line (which despite its gauge was and is part of the French national railway network)

Ecueille is on the southern end of the BA that closed to passengers in 1980 and to freight in 1989. It is now the headquarters of the SABA group (Société d'Animation du Blanc-Argent) that have restored this part of the line as a heritage railway though the station buidling itself is (or was when I took this photo) a private house.  

 

The Blanc -Argent still runs as an SNCF operated TER service between Salbris and Valençay though freight, mostly grain,  finished completely in 1989.

 

On the road side of these local stations there was often a carved sign saying Chemin de Fer rather than the name of the station. Users arriving to catch a train presumably knew where they were but needed to know , particularly when it was quite new,  that they'd actually found the railway station.

 

Other designs did also exist

This is Arques la Bataille on the former Dieppe-Paris main line (most of it now a "greenway" cycle route though the line here was still intact to serve a quarry) I don't know whether this sign would have been SNCF or the former C.F.de l'Etat. Once again it looks to possibly have been covering an original carved sign.

 

 

Edited October 11, 2019 by Pacific231G

[Whitcan]

Gents

 

Many thanks for your replies.  Very helpful.

 

I have been playing around with the suggested fonts to replicate a photo of Villelaure, as this is a good example of what I want to achieve.  To my mind the Eurostyle font was the closest, an opinion backed up by my resident member of the public!  It is the shape of the 'U' that makes the difference.

 

 

Thoughts?

 

Regards

 

Paul

[Andy Hayter]

It looks a very similar typeface style but the letter thickness looks a little lean to me.  What happens if you make the script Bold?

[Whitcan]

Unfortunately, that is with it 'bold'

[Whitcan]

There is a different version of the EuroStyle font - EuroStyle extended:

 

[eastwestdivide]

Looks like a Eurostile Narrow variant is pretty close.

But find enough samples and you could trace your own?

[ianp]

Dropping that pic of the Villelaure sign into Whatthefont suggests it might be replicated by a font called Coldharbour Gothic: https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/result which cunningly replicates some of the rusty smudges on the lettering.

[Pacific231G]

On 11/10/2019 at 16:35, Whitcan said:

There is a different version of the EuroStyle font - EuroStyle extended:

 

THat still looks a bit light but if you put it into Photoshop or PSP (or any other graphics package) you could narrow it a bit. you could also shorten the central stroke of the E and you might be able to make the downstroke of the R vertical. I found that entering the name as text at the largest size you could work with made it a lot easier to modify each letter in turn.

Looking at this again I'm now convinced that this typeface is a variant of the SNCF typeface (police SNCF) but slightly modified presumably for legibility. The only letter that seems significantly different is the flattened U and that doesn't always appear. I'd like to see a station sign with a W or a Q in it . 

 

The best result I got was using Police SNCF (it only has one weight so bold doesn't change it) but stretching it by 10% in Paint Shop. The flattened U is fairly distinctive when it appears but it might be possible to pinch that from a sufficiently similar font. In the end I found enough examples of the rounded U being used to justify using it for my own station names but it would be very satisfying to get hold of the actual version of their typeface that SNCF used for station names and lineside signs for drivers. I don't know if SNCF originated it or took it from one or other of the previous companies.  

Colharbour Gothic is interesting and thouigh it's only upper case I can see uses for it for old shop signs etc. but compared with the face used for station names it's a much wider typeface and several letters are differently formed, notably K, G, R, S which are more elaborated than in the SNCF font. I did try narrowing the U from it to use with SNCF but it didn't quite work.