“Scratching” the surface
Originating from the Italian word “graffiato” (scratched), graffiti is a practice as old as time. Its root word is Italian in origin because it dates back to the heyday of Rome, over 2,500 years ago. Looking back even further, the same concept — petroglyphs — have been dated to well over 40,000 years old. It is an innate human desire, it seems, to want to put your mark on something.
Equally innate is the human desire to not have one’s property vandalized, or be subjected to the potentially upsetting images that graffiti artists often create. One of the earliest depictions of the crucifixion of Jesus is the Alexamenos graffito (dating to 200 AD), which is widely believed to be an attempt at blasphemously mocking a specific individual; almost 100 years earlier, Greek scholar Plutarch was irritated enough to specifically deride the near-ubiquitous carvings in his writings. Clearly the polarization between graffiti and everyone who is annoyed by it began early.
Moving several thousand years ahead to the modern day, the situation has not improved much. As society advanced to where a common person could own valuable property such as buildings, automobiles, and even a business, the unwanted intrusion of other people’s “art” went from an annoyance to a crime. Graffiti stopped being “art” and started becoming vandalism, as the damage it caused to property grew. It certainly didn’t help that “modern graffiti” — as in the elaborate spray-paint designs seen the world over, rather than words scratched or painted into a surface (think “Kilroy was here”) — grew out of black American culture in the 1960s, hardly a time of racial equality or harmony, especially in the rapidly-decaying northeastern megalopolis. While initially accepted by cultural tastemakers such as Norman Mailer, the predominantly white city governments of New York and Philadelphia soon decried graffiti as a sign of urban blight, permanently entrenching the art form as a subversive and criminal endeavor.
Tagging the rails
The story of railroads and graffiti begins in the late 1800s, when hobos and tramps began placing “monikers” on freight cars. The simplest form of graffiti, a moniker is merely a name or some form of wordmark or symbol. Fittingly, the simplest form of graffiti represents the simplest form of human expression: “I was here.”
Gradually, hobo graffiti grew in complexity, if not scale. Unlike modern graffiti, which usually is placed prominently in gaudy colors, hobo symbols are clandestine, meant to share information about a location with future arrivals. While some of the more elaborate signs are a creation of fiction, the general idea remains true. A relatively simple sign could be an arrow pointing east, indicating the hobo’s intended direction of travel.
Monikers and signs in this style continued into the 1970s and 1980s. One notable individual, using the 1920s-era “Bozo Texino” moniker, marked over 30,000 freight cars in one year during the 1970s; he worked for a railroad — a rare case of the call coming from inside the house.
Collision course
Modern graffiti and the railroads first came into contact during the 1970s. New York City was the most public venue for the clashes of art vs. authority, with the rapidly-tagged subway system becoming a visible sign that the city was losing. Gone were the small monikers of hobos, and the “Kilroy was here” style graffiti of the 1940s. In its place were “tags” and “pieces.” Tags are the smaller of the two forms of graffiti, essentially a modern form of the hobo moniker. Pieces, on the other hand, are closer to murals than anything else. Bright, gaudy, and all-encompassing, the only limit is the artist’s reach. On the New York Subway, this meant that an entire subway train could very quickly become one giant piece — inside and out. Those trains not devoted to one artist (or a “crew” of artists) soon became a patchwork of tags and small pieces, instantly emblematic of the Big Apple’s precipitous decline.
New York would eventually fight off the graffiti, banishing it from its subway with rigid enforcement of anti-vandalism laws and the introduction of stainless steel trains that would be removed from service at the first sighting of a tag. But the damage was already done. New York is one of the most visible cities in the world, and the graffiti genie could not be put back into its spray bottle once the first tagged train went into service; it simply meant would-be artists had to go further afield. Infrastructure — buildings, bridges, and the like — were a common target, but their stationary nature meant that only so many people would see the work. Graffiti practitioners want their work in front of as many eyes as possible; subway trains were a great means to that end, as they constantly were in motion, passing through station after crowded station, occasionally taking flight on elevated portions of the system. One train could be seen by a million people if it was on the right line.
Closed out of public transit systems by increasing security measures, graffiti creators had to come up with alternatives. They needed something big, visible, and mobile, while at the same time occupying quiet, out-of-the-way spaces for long periods of time.
What followed was a seismic shift in the visual landscape of railroading. Railcars became a sea of spray paint, tags and pieces plastering everything from tankers to auto racks, even locomotives. Railroads and leasing companies own hundreds of thousands of cars, each of which moves across the country every day. They simply do not have enough time, money, or manpower to police every mile of track they own, let alone customer sidings and storage yards. For similar reasons, once the graffiti has been applied, there is little incentive to remove it; provided that it isn’t obscuring a reporting mark, the art will stay, sometimes for decades if left unmolested.
As a result, the rails have become a de facto home to the graffiti community, with each train a billboard for someone’s work. These works aren’t condoned by the property owners, the railroads — or Trains.com — and are very much illegal. However, they are without question a component of modern railroading.
The Devil works fast, but graffiti is faster
The CPKC merger was inked less than a year before this photo was taken, and only a small number of new-build auto racks — all destined for CPKC de México — had seen the new logos applied. In spite of this, one enterprising artist has already managed to put their mark on the car. Note how the reporting mark and other information placards are still visible. Railroads will often remove graffiti if it obscures important information on the side of a car, so savvy artists mask this out during painting.
A blank canvas
The boxcar has long been a favorite of the graffiti artist: large, flat, and often parked in unguarded sidings for long periods. This line of RailBox boxcars illustrates the appeal quite clearly; each one has been tagged by a different person or group at a different time.
No job too large …
There’s only one car more favored by graffiti artists than the boxcar, and that’s the auto rack. These perfectly flat, over-height workhorses of the automotive industry are prime real estate for massive pieces.
… Or too small
Some cars manage to escape being excessively marked — how this happens is often a matter of chance and circumstance. This hopper may owe its current status to its cargo of sodium chlorate. Used in the bleaching of wood pulp, sodium chlorate is both highly toxic and highly explosive, and is loaded and unloaded in access-controlled facilities. The only time it can be effectively tagged is in transit, and as such it has received minimal graffiti.
Instant recognition
The “SLUTS” crew is familiar to both the graffiti and the railfan community. An anonymous group, their chosen style is to completely cover a boxcar from top to bottom with their wordmark. A well-known example is boxcar BKTY 151909, which features video game character Sonic the Hedgehog on a stark white background with blue lettering. Its distinctive appearance has caused photos of it to go viral on multiple occasions.
Equality under the spray can
Graffiti practitioners would tag more passenger equipment if they could. The reason why they don’t is the simple matter that passenger equipment is often stored more securely, and is often under greater levels of observation. When passenger equipment goes into storage, such as these Metra Highliners, the artists descend on them, quickly erasing any difference between a bi-level coach and a tri-level auto rack.
Fan favorites
Not all graffiti is done alike, or for the same reasons. The placement of the art on trains means that some crossover with the railfan community is inevitable. At top, former LIRR power car No. 3100 was painted with an affectionate recreation of its former Western Maryland Railroad livery shortly before being sent off for scrap. At bottom, a railfan with more enthusiasm than skill tagged the blank side of CN 3974 with an homage to Conrail.
The final tag
Graffiti started in New York City, but by the mid-1980s, it was effectively evicted from its birthplace by stringent anti-vandalism legislation taken by the city. During this so-called “Die Hard Era,” the few remaining graffiti artists stuck to lines where trains were in the process of being replaced, and enforcement was therefore lax. By 1985, the last graffitied train on the system was officially cleaned, in no small part due to the all stainless steel construction of the city’s subway fleet, pioneered by the Budd-built R32 “Brightliner” cars. Since then, graffiti has been seldom seen on the MTA, and is not venerated when it is.
It therefore seems somewhat appropriate that the cars that ushered out the era of graffiti were themselves tagged on the way to the scrapper. At top, an R123 car, used for continuous welded rail service, was covered in a full-on piece at some point before it was shipped off for disposal. Meanwhile, the R32s themselves (at bottom) remained relatively mark-free right until the end — except for car 3897, which received a small tag over the dot-matrix display. A fitting end for the cars that vanquished the graffiti.
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