Automatic car license plate recognition (LPR) is widely used nowadays. It involves plate localization in the image, character segmentation and optical character recognition. In this paper, a set of descriptors of image segments (characters) was proposed as well as a technique of multi-stage classification of letters and digits using cascade of neural network and several parallel Random Forest or classification tree or rule list classifiers. The proposed solution was applied to automated recognition of number plates which are composed of capital Latin letters and Arabic numerals. The paper presents an analysis of the accuracy of the obtained classifiers. The time needed to build the classifier and the time needed to classify characters using it are also presented.