Rail Alphabet is a neo-grotesque

sans-serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif (), gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than ...

typeface A typeface (or font family) is a design of Letter (alphabet), letters, Numerical digit, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, ...

British Rail British Railways (BR), which from 1965 traded as British Rail, was a state-owned company that operated most rail transport in Great Britain from 1948 to 1997. Originally a trading brand of the Railway Executive of the British Transport Comm ...

network. First used at

Liverpool Street station Liverpool Street station, also known as London Liverpool Street, is a major central London railway terminus and connected London Underground station in the north-eastern corner of the City of London, in the ward of Bishopsgate Without. It i ...

, it was then adopted by the

Design Research Unit The Design Research Unit (DRU) was one of the first generation of British design, design consultancies combining expertise in architecture, graphics and industrial design. It was established in 1943 by the poet Herbert Read, architect Misha Black ...

(DRU) as part of their comprehensive 1965 rebranding of the company. It was later used by other public bodies in the United Kingdom. A redesigned version, Rail Alphabet 2, is planned to be used across the Great British Railways network, whilst the double arrow logo will also be restored as the primary brand identifier for the network. Rail Alphabet is similar to a bold weight of

Helvetica Helvetica, also known by its original name Neue Haas Grotesk, is a widely-used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann. Helvetica is a neo-grotesque design, one influenced by the f ...

, but with some differences in character shapes, stroke width and

x-height upright 2.0, alt=A diagram showing the line terms used in typography In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the le ...

to aid legibility. The typeface also has some similarities to

Akzidenz-Grotesk Akzidenz-Grotesk is a sans-serif typeface family originally released by the Berthold Type Foundry of Berlin in 1898. ' indicates its intended use as a typeface for commercial print runs such as publicity, tickets and forms, as opposed to fine pr ...

, which had earlier provided the same designers the broad inspiration for the

Transport Transport (in British English) or transportation (in American English) is the intentional Motion, movement of humans, animals, and cargo, goods from one location to another. Mode of transport, Modes of transport include aviation, air, land tr ...

typeface used for road signs in the United Kingdom. The typeface was designed specifically for signage and the designers included features to support this such as a bespoke

letter-spacing Examples of headline letter spacing Letter spacing, character spacing or tracking is an optically consistent typographical adjustment to the space between letters to change the visual density of a line or block of text. Letter spacing is disti ...

system and two slightly different weights to provide optimum visibility on both light and dark backgrounds.

British Rail

In 1949, the Railway Executive decided on standard types of signs to be used at all stations. Lettering was to use redrawn versions of

Gill Sans Gill Sans is a Sans-serif#Humanist, humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Eric Gill and released by the British branch of Monotype Imaging, Monotype in 1928. It is based on Edward Johnston's 1916 "Johnston (typeface), Underground Alphabet", t ...

lettering on a background of the regional colour. This style persisted for nearly 15 years. In the early 1960s,

British Railways British Railways (BR), which from 1965 traded as British Rail, was a state-owned company that operated most rail transport in Great Britain from 1948 to 1997. Originally a trading brand of the Railway Executive of the British Transport Commis ...

(which rebranded as British Rail in 1965) trialled new signs at Coventry station that made use of Kinneir and Calvert's recently launched Transport typeface. While Transport has since been an enduring success on road signs, it was designed around the specific needs of road users – such as visibility at speed and in all weathers. The subsequent creation of Rail Alphabet was intended to provide a style of lettering more specifically suited to stations where it would primarily be viewed indoors by pedestrians. The

's 1965 rebranding of British Railways included a new logo (the double arrow), a shortened name

, and the total adoption of Rail Alphabet for all lettering other than printed matter including station signage, trackside signs, fixed notices, signs inside trains and train liveries. Key elements of the rebranding were still being used during much of the 1980s and Rail Alphabet was also used as part of the livery of

Sealink Sealink was a ferry company based in Great Britain from 1970 to 1984, operating services to France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, the Isle of Wight and Ireland. Ports served by the company included: Dover, F ...

ships until that company's privatisation in the late 1980s. However, by the end of the 1980s, British Rail's various business units were developing their own individual brands and identities with use of Rail Alphabet declining as a consequence. The typeface remained in near-universal use for signs at railway stations but began to be replaced with alternatives in other areas, such as in InterCity's 1989 Mark 4 passenger carriages which made use of Frutiger for much of their interior signage.

After British Rail

The

privatisation of British Rail The privatisation of British Rail was the process by which ownership and operation of the Rail transport in Great Britain, railways of Great Britain passed from government control into private hands. Begun in 1994, the process was largely compl ...

from 1994 accelerated the decline in use of the typeface on the railway network with most of the privatised

train operating companies In the railway system of Great Britain, a train operating company (TOC) is a railway undertaking operating passenger trains under the collective National Rail brand. TOCs have existed since the privatisation of the network under the Railways ...

who now manage individual stations choosing to use the typefaces associated with their own corporate identities for station signs and publicity. More recently, the custom Brunel typeface introduced by

Railtrack Railtrack was a group of companies that owned the railroad, track, railway signalling, signalling, tunnels, bridges, level crossings and all but a handful of the railway station, stations of the Transport in England#Rail, British railway syste ...

for signs at major stations and adapted by

Network Rail Network Rail Limited is the owner (via its subsidiary Network Rail Infrastructure Limited, which was known as Railtrack plc before 2002) and railway infrastructure manager, infrastructure manager of most of the railway network in Great Britain. ...

as NR Brunel was recommended as a new national standard for station signs by a 2009 report commissioned by the

Secretary of State for Transport The secretary of state for transport, also referred to as the transport secretary, is a Secretary of State (United Kingdom), secretary of state in the Government of the United Kingdom, with overall responsibility for the policies of the Departm ...

, and was used extensively by

South West Trains Stagecoach South Western Trains Limited, trading as South West Trains (SWT), was an English train operating company owned by Stagecoach, which operated the South Western franchise between February 1996 and August 2017. SWT operated the majori ...

and

East Midlands Trains East Midlands Trains (EMT) was a British train operating company owned by the transport group Stagecoach, which operated the East Midlands franchise between November 2007 and August 2019. Following the Department for Transport (DfT) award of ...

. Meanwhile, Helvetica Medium has replaced Rail Alphabet as the industry's preferred typeface for safety notices within passenger trains due to the ready availability of the former and for consistency with

British Standards British Standards (BS) are the standards produced by the BSI Group which is incorporated under a royal charter and which is formally designated as the national standards body (NSB) for the UK. The BSI Group produces British Standards under th ...

on general safety signs. Some train operators continued use of Rail Alphabet long into the privatisation era. Arriva Trains Wales used the typeface until the end of the franchise in 2018, with

First Great Western First Greater Western, trading as Great Western Railway (GWR), is a British train operating company owned by FirstGroup that provides services in the Greater Western franchise area. It manages 197 stations and its trains call at over 270. GWR ...

also making extensive use of Rail Alphabet for signage until the firm's rebranding to Great Western Railway in 2015.

Merseyrail Merseyrail is a commuter rail network which serves Merseyside and adjacent areas of Cheshire and Lancashire in the North West England, North West of England. Merseyrail serves 69 Railway station, stations, 67 of which it manages, across two lin ...

continues to use the typeface for station signage. The use of the typeface is also still prescribed by standards for trackside warning signs and safety/operating notices.

Other uses

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Rail Alphabet was used by certain other state-owned corporations and organisations in the UK. The

National Health Service The National Health Service (NHS) is the term for the publicly funded health care, publicly funded healthcare systems of the United Kingdom: the National Health Service (England), NHS Scotland, NHS Wales, and Health and Social Care (Northern ...

in England, Scotland and Wales adopted Rail Alphabet for its signs. It is still the dominant typeface used on signs in older hospitals. It ceased to be used in new builds in the late 1990s. NHS England now uses Frutiger, while

NHS Scotland NHS Scotland, sometimes styled NHSScotland, is the publicly–funded healthcare system in Scotland and one of the four systems that make up the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. It operates 14 territorial NHS boards across Scotland ...

uses Stone Sans. Rail Alphabet was widely used on signs by the

British Airports Authority Heathrow Airport Holdings is a company that operates and manages Heathrow Airport based in London, England. It was formed by the privatisation of the British Airports Authority as BAA plc as part of Margaret Thatcher's privatisation of governme ...

and by Danish railway company DSB. It was also used on signage for the

National Coal Board The National Coal Board (NCB) was the statutory corporation created to run the nationalised coal mining industry in the United Kingdom. Set up under the Coal Industry Nationalisation Act 1946, it took over the United Kingdom's collieries on "ve ...

. Road signs in Iran used Rail Alphabet typeface for English texts.

Digitisation and updates

New Rail Alphabet

In 2009, a newly digitised version of the typeface was publicly released. Created by Henrik Kubel of A2/SW/HK in close collaboration with Margaret Calvert, New Rail Alphabet features six weights: off white, white, light, medium, bold and black, with non-aligning numerals, corresponding italics and a set of

Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...

characters.

Rail Alphabet 2

In 2020, Network Rail announced that it had commissioned an updated version of the typeface. Designed by Margaret Calvert and Henrik Kubel, Rail Alphabet 2 (RA2) includes lighter versions of the lettering as well as italics for signage along with accompanying versions for use in printed matter and online. The redesign also includes new pictograms to depict services and facilities which did not exist in the 1960s when the original typeface was conceived – such as gender neutral toilets and vaping areas. In October 2020, Network Rail announced that starting with London Paddington, the updated RA2 typeface will replace Brunel for all signage on all Network Rail managed major stations on the network. Network Rail will also begin using the typeface for corporate communications. In May 2021, as part of the Williams Rail Review, it was announced that the new government body Great British Railways (GBR) will introduce Rail Alphabet 2 on the rail network, replacing the many different typefaces used on railway signage since privatisation.

References

External links

{{commons
Commercial release
(includes pdf specimen and archive photos)
Flickr photos
of Rail Alphabet in use British Rail Government typefaces Corporate typefaces Neo-grotesque sans-serif typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1965 Display typefaces