Meet the Thoroughbred

While NS' corporate symbol appears on everything from business cards to advertisements to locomotives, the Thoroughbred that has come to represent speed, reliability and worthy bloodlines around the world has actually been several horses over the years.

The first, David, lived in New Jersey. When introduced in 1982, not long after the consolidation that created Norfolk Southern, he was shown in an advertisement titled "From the Championship Heritage of Two Great Railways Comes Norfolk Southern Corporation: The Thoroughbred."

A year later, he was depicted as a youngster racing alongside his noble parents. In another ad, he was grown up - bridled and carrying a jockey. But soon the bridle came off and he was running free, fast and riderless.

Early promotional films and videos featured another horse, Citizen X, from Ocala, Fla. In preparation for going before the camera, Citizen X patiently endured the application of black shoe polish over small white patches on his face and legs.

In the mid-1980s, David and Citizen X were followed by Topper.

Topper, now retired in Southern California, has been photographed so often that NS has hundreds of images of him on file and still uses them today. Topper never seemed to mind rearing up on his back legs, but he was sometimes reluctant to run before the cameras. When a tasty treat could not convince him to budge, the strategic placement of his girlfriend, Skipper, a few hundred feet away rarely failed to motivate him.

In recent years, NS has been represented on TV by an animated Thoroughbred that "morphs" into products the railroad ships, such as coal, steel and grain. This horse nearly had his celluloid career cut short when, in the middle of the night, rats in the Portland, Ore., studio ate the corn that was being used to fashion his grain version.

The Norfolk Southern Thoroughbred has been portrayed in virtually every conceivable location: in the ocean surf, in the forest, on a mountaintop, in an icy stream, in tall grass, on a giant pile of coal, on the farm, in the desert and in a bayou, in lands as far away as Alaska.

But perhaps the oddest use of the Thoroughbred symbol occurred in the early 1990s, when NS issued a colorful Picasso-style rendition of him on t-shirts. More recently, the company's souvenir catalog has offered the stuffed "Lil' Thoroughbred" and the bean bag "Thoroughbred Baby" for children.

A curious myth has grown up over the years about the Thoroughbred. Some people believe that company policy dictates that he only run to the right. Not true. While the Thoroughbred always faces right in NS' printed logo, in photographs and illustrations he's allowed to run in whatever direction need and reason take him.

Just like the new Norfolk Southern that he represents.

Whenever and wherever it's used, Norfolk Southern's logo says quality…

Like the Thoroughbred, the NS logo is synonymous with safety and service. The five speedlines merging into the slanted NS initials with the words "Norfolk Southern" beside or below the initials, sometimes with and sometimes without the Thoroughbred, constitute our corporate signature.

The NS logo was created in 1982 to represent the company after its name was selected from among 200 contenders. An interesting note about the logo is that the typeface was designed solely for NS use - it doesn't exist anywhere except within the logo itself.