Metra logo and timetables

Contributed by Florian Hardwig

The Metra logo uses Crillee, an italic-only typeface designed by Dick Jones and issued by Letraset in 1980.

Metra is the commuter rail system in the Chicago metropolitan area serving the city of Chicago and its surrounding suburbs. From Metra:

Due to the complicated and patchwork nature of commuter rail at the time, the [Commuter Rail Division] in 1985 came up with the “Metra” name as a service mark for the entire system (short for “Metropolitan Rail”). The idea was to bring a unifying identity to all the various components, no matter who owned or operated them.

The wordmark has the lowercase glyphs raised and aligned to the cap line. The space underneath is filled by two underlines, the lower one extending from the M, with bracketed endings echoing Crillee’s baseline terminals. Introduced in 1985, it was implemented on trains already in 1986. Usually seen in white on blue, it is still in use to this day.

In the early years, the full name “Metropolitan Rail” was spelled out underneath the wordmark, in Helvetica Bold Italic. The same typeface was used for the slogan “The way to really fly”, introduced in 1986.

Timetables from the 1980s and 1990s feature text in various weights from Eurostile, with upright Helvetica for labels, see below. Jim Ellwanger (trainman) shows many more timetables in his Flickr collection.

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

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