Gregory's Serverdid I spend all of yesterday making a taxonomy of national railway logos? uh, maybe
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@PJFDF yes, I had it in initialisms first - but I think they're also trying to evoke the lines-and-arrows type image? could have gone either way there @Gaelan The first thing I checked was whether Sri Lanka Railway is there. š And it is there indeed!  @acb Journey Beyond operates the Ghan, Indian Pacific and Overland. Closest we have to a national passenger rail operator now @robertstainsby Arenāt those all premium-priced tourist cruise services, as opposed to practical transport? Iād argue that, for example, NSW TrainLinkās XPT services (which cross into Victoria and Queensland) count more as a national passenger operator, as one could theoretically use them for transport. @acb yes, thereās a case to be made there. But the Overland is practical transport, or at least as practical as the XPTs. @robertstainsby @acb trainlink has 10x daily services to Australia's largest city, 2x to 2nd largest city, 1x to 3rd largest city and 3x to capital city. Journey beyond has 2 trains a week in the entire country that have seats and aren't run as a cruise with multi hour stops for tours. It's a shame they rebranded from countrylink, which legitimately sounds like the national railway it basically is :p @jedsetter @robertstainsby @acb Hardly a national railway when it serves predominantly NSW and Brisbane, Canberra and Melbourne... @MelbPTUser @robertstainsby @acb I don't know it's kind of impressive that a state railway connects Australia's four most important cities (ok theres a perth/brisbane debate) and maybe 80% of the population?  @Gaelan This is great, thanks! Here is the result of a query for all logos of railway companies (not limited to national ones and including historical ones) that are currently recorded in #Wikidata ā in case somebody wants to take a look at some more: https://w.wiki/7cB5  @Gaelan A couple more for your collection: Canadian National (CN) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_National_Railway Central Vermont (CV) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Vermont_Railway @Gaelan Interesting! Only "Cuba" in "none of the above" is a locomotive, so belongs to that category š @mrotteveel sure is generally I put ones that were both an initialism and something else with the "something else", so I probably should've done the same with the Czech one at some point I had a category for "initialism with railway-related motif", but I abandoned that for a finer-grained split into several different motifs, and having separate categories for, say, "track/arrows with initialism" and "locomotive with initialism" seemed excessive @Gaelan Cool. I would further suggest to put Cuba to the lokomotive, North Macedonian to rail profiles, and Sudan to the Tracks category. šš  @Gaelan The ĆBB deserve extra credit for having ticked off both āwinged wheelsā and āstylised arrowsā in the last two iterations of their logo before landing on the current initialism. @Gaelan bah, here are non-transparent images which may actually be visible. They look better in the wild anyway. The arrow version is universally known as the āPflatschā, more or less āthe splatā.  @Gaelan maybe to far away from the theme of your infographic, but let me introduce you the logo of PKP PLK, Polish national railway infrastructure company, which has both wings and track profile @Gaelan very cool! if I may ā¦ the British Rail double arrow symbol only applies to GB, not NI, which is separate (logos attached, I prefer the old one) (arrows trivia for those curious: itās nowadays owned by the Department for Transport, and licensed to the Association of Train Operating Companies, branded as National Rail) (itās also arguable that in Scotland and Wales the logos of the national TOCs is appropriate? :o though these do still run under the National Rail branding so maybe not!) @Gaelan (bonus: this image featuring two even older NI Railways logos, yay!) @eval I limited myself to a "main" one per sovereign state because any other way lies madness - arguably the Australian states (I listed Journey Beyond, which is the descendant of a useful national operator but mostly just caters to tourists), Hong Kong, the half of Bosnia and Herzegovina that is neither Bosnia nor Herzegovina, and possibly Catalonia/Basque (though I think Renfe might do their intercity stuff) deserve their own logos as well @Gaelan @eval I was gonna mention, Journey Beyond isn't a transport operator, they're a rail cruiseline! we just never had a good federal rail operator, and all passenger services are by the state governments. the federal government does have the Australian Rail Track Corporation, but they don't even own the most track, nor do they run the trains @Gaelan Pretty awesome, I think you'll have to amend it a bit since there's two of Slovenia, and I guess one of them should be Slovakia. No worries, a very common mistake. ;) @Gaelan Nice. I have to say Georgia Railway's initialism is rather special. Reminds me of Illinois Central's rail profile back in the day. New Zealand's "misc. track motif" gets my nod. Wings are weird. Slovenia... isn't that the Philadelphia Flyers? Cuba's belongs in the "locomotive motifs," doesn't it? @Gaelan Slovenia should have itās own category, ālogos taken from NHL teamsā. Philadelphia flyers innit @Gaelan hey, saw all the complaints about portugal, but why are Norway not in the track group? Norway is mountainous. I think those are tracks. (I highly recommend going on a train through Norway) @maxwainwright yeah that's fair - the more I think about my handling of the various letter-based ones the less sure I am lmao @krono doesn't really fit in with the rest of the category tho - they're all stylized nose shapes  (nvm I saw you already answered this) but, shouldn't RENFE be in "Initialisms"? REd Nacional de Ferrocarriles EspaƱoles @elizabeth reminds me of the Singapore MRT (which does make it in, despite being a metro, because it handles rail for the entire country!) - I wonder if they were going for a coupler as well? @elizabeth making use of a bit of english pedantry: acronyms are pronounced as one word (eg NASA, Renfe), while initialisms are pronounced as individual letters (eg SNCF) @Gaelan Source: https://www.sncf.com/fr/groupe/patrimoine/histoire-logo @Gaelan Living in Denmark, the DSB logo is a real problem since they put it on the doors of carriages. What shape and colour is the logo? A stop sign. What do they put on doors that are out of service? Also a stop sign. I canāt fathom how it was decided that a stop sign was the best new logo for a transport company. The old logo (1998-2008) was at leastā¦not a stop sign. @Gaelan actually Portugal's also an initialism, as it stands for CP (Comboios de Portugal).  @Gaelan I don't know what it is, given it's such a simple logo, but I have such a fondness for the Deutsche Bahn logo. @Gaelan I think Jordan belongs into the Wings category and Nigeria belongs to Locomotive motifs. @Gaelan funny to see by the logo that Ferroviaria Oriental from Bolivia, is owned by Genesee & Wyoming. Cargo operator āRotterdam Rail Feedingā (RRF) has the same design, copying from their mother company.  @Gaelan shout-out to my country (Argentina) for having one of the most boring logos |
@Gaelan I love how in every taxonomy thereās always a none of the above taxon. Doesnāt matter if itās insects or dinosaurs or railway logos, it never *quite * works out as neatly as weād like.