That is a pity of sorts, for US English at 1252 is a sensible default when UTF-8 is unavailable (there might be an issue with curly, aka "smart" quotation marks, but in principle codepage 1252 should not throw a problem for ASCI characters).
You might consider re-setting the locale to system default just in case by running
Sys.setlocale(category = "LC_ALL", locale = "")
but your issue seems different from mine after all 