Railway Font

Railway Sans is a previously unpublished work, originally digitised by my late friend and partner, the typographer Justin Howes, in 1994, some seventy-eight years after the first appearance of Johnston's Railway type in 1916. Using an old SPARC station, some bitmap-to-vector software which I'd written which output in ASCII Type 3 font format and a Crosfield drum scanner to initially capture the outlines, these were then converted from bitmaps into vector font data. Justin had wanted to capture and make an experimental font of this version, drawn directly from Johnston's original artwork of 1913-1915 as part of the book he was writing on Edward Johnston and other Johnston-related research, and later revisions and variations which were originally the only characters in the typeface in various samples and working proofs kindly lent by Andrew Johnston.

This version of the original Johnston typeface of 1916, in both TrueType and OpenType format, will work with Macs, Linux and Windows computers and will provide authenticity when recreating Underground signage. This is why I am making this version available for enthusiasts who seek an authentic-looking digital version of the original Underground type. It is not derived from the Banks's and Miles New Johnston Sans (so brilliantly realised by Eiichi Kono, 1979). Nor is it a copy or in any way a facsimile of any existing commercial typeface, such as P22's excellent version, Underground. It is rendered entirely from proofs done by Edward Johnston himself at the time the face was commissioned.