>There were a bunch of links, of course, and I didn't look at all of them, but I was disappointed in the seeming lack of scientific research on this matter.
>
>My search:
>
>http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2005-49,GGLG:en&q=flatten+penny+on+railroad+track

That's the trouble with English - words are used, reused and overused, and not changing form while doing so. Only yesterday I read about someone complaining that the machine translation is worthless, because it translates "Art in China" as "art in porcelain". Of course it's worthless, when one of the languages is English.

Searching the Web in English is a special art - you can't search by a word, because you'll find it in unbelievable places. Once I searched for "record inflation", hoping to find articles about the unbelievable inflation we had in 1993 (you had to logarithm it twice to get the price graph to be linear!), and what did I get? All sorts of tires, air mattresses, balloons etc. These should be under "blowing up", one'd say? No, because that means either magnification or explosion.

Back to the crown issue... no matter that this is a Republic for 2++ centuries, there's still so much royalistic nostalgia here. Just counting the toponyms around, there's Kings Arms, Bold Ruler, Knight Court, Kings Grant rd... and then anything can have a crown, even a tree.