Door Markings

[david moore]

David; I believe that I am correct in recalling that the RCASC were the only unit to omit the "dash 1 dash" from the earlier style markings i.e. the year plus vehicle number registered in sequence. Not sure what the logic was behind this. But this would be consistent with what is seen here. The M,Z,H etc. letter was not used with this earlier style it appears.

For the later style Canadian ( home-based) numbers, the first two digits identify the vehicle type as far as I know. The British-style vehicle type letter ( e.g. Z) also seems to be commonly used with this system. Presumably 65 was a HU-WIRE 1 and 58 was John's type of HUP.
My very limited data base shows 54= C15A GS, 56 =WIRE1 , 57=FAT, 69=Otter, 83=carrier. For vehicle types having more than 999 actual vehicles on the road, they must have resorted to more than one code number - but maybe there were'nt often that many left-in-Canada vehicles.

I would very much like to fill out this database of all Canadian census systems and have been studying all the photos I can lay my hands on. If anyone has any original photos and would send me the number ( even with "x's" marking illegible characters), I would be happy to add to my list and try to make some sense of it all. Any data will be available to all. While you are about it please add vehicle type, location, date and unit if any of this is known. Please DON"T send restored vehicle numbers unless you KNOW that they are as per original!

If someone has all of this info already organized, please let me know so I don't waste any more of my time! Also I am happy to stand corrected on my comments!