![]() Photo by James Gibbon at en.wikipedia (Own work), via Wikimedia Commonsĭeliberately, Rail Alphabet is neither showy nor shouty. ![]() The Rail Alphabet departure board dates from British Rail days, while later signage (with blue backgrounds) is in Railtrack’s Brunel typeface. One of the best places to see Rail Alphabet was on the large “Solari” departure boards at stations. It’s certainly more tightly spaced, and I think the width of the letter strokes is a little more consistent throughout. It is similar to Helvetica, but distinctively different, though it’s hard to say exactly why. The result of Calvert and Kinneir’s assessment of the needs of a typeface at railway stations as opposed to one being designed for roads is that Rail Alphabet’s letters are slightly heavier and more closely spaced than those of Transport, with less exaggerated tails on the letters. No-one else has come close to designing so much of what creates the everyday experience of the appearance of Britain’s public realm. If anyone can lay any claim to having branded Britain in the post-war period, it is surely Calvert and Kinneir. Calvert and Kinneir were asked to design a typeface specifically for the railway, and so it was that this pair of designers ended up defining the ‘feel’ not just of Britain’s roads, but its railways (and later, its airports too). In a station environment, where there was more time to read signage, speed of interpretation was no longer the key concern. British Railways tried out signage using Transport at Coventry station (as detailed here), but it wasn’t entirely satisfactory.Īs Calvert would later explain, the problem was that Transport was designed to be quickly assimilated by drivers as road signs were approached at speed. The company had been much impressed by the Transport typeface designed by Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir as part of a comprehensive road network resigning programme launched in the 1960s. It wasn’t actually British Rail’s first go at a new typeface for the rail blue corporate identity. Photo by 70023venus2009 via this flickr page Because this blog doesn’t feature hovercraft very often, here is Rail Alphabet on a cross-channel hovercraft: British Rail operated cross-channel hovercraft like this one under the Seaspeed brand between 19. It would go on to be applied everywhere across the British Rail network, including the company’s road vehicles, hovercraft and ships. It was well proportioned, with nicely rounded ‘0’s, ‘o’s and ‘O’s for instance – unlike the rectangular locomotive lettering. It was a mixed upper and lower case typeface, instantly looking more friendly than Gill Sans. Rail Alphabet was the answer to these challenges. And I’m afraid I can’t think of any word other than ‘ugly’ for that one. Meanwhile, a condensed (narrow) rectangular font served for train numbers on many locomotives. This bossy and sometimes difficult typeface seemed increasingly out of place in the more informal 1960s, as longstanding social norms were challenged or abandoned. Most frequently seen was Gill Sans, a chilly all-upper case typeface dating from before the second world war and inherited from the London and North Eastern Railway ( read more about it here). British Railways (as it was publicly known until 1966) even had multiple typefaces in use on its signage and its trains. It was designed to wipe out the existing hotchpotch of styles and motifs which had graphically illustrated the confused nature of the business from its creation in 1948 until that point. Picture by Pneumaman (UniversSpec.png), via Wikimedia CommonsīR’s “rail blue” corporate identity, which was officially applied from 1966 onwards, was one of the most comprehensive ever adopted by any British transport company, and indeed probably any transport company (you can read two earlier entries about it here and here). ![]() It was called Rail Alphabet and it has subsequently proved to be the most successful and long-lasting element of the corporate identity. When British Rail unveiled its comprehensive corporate identity in 1964, one of the key elements which made it work was a new typeface. ![]()
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