Western Railroad Discussion > Graffiti Timeline

ok boys and girls ... watching train videos i'm trying to pinpoint a timeline when all this graffiti crap took over and completely ruined a pasttime for it's esthetics ... so your mission boys and girls should you decide to accept it is to establish a timeline through your photos and videos of when graffiti went from a painted car here and there to eeeeeeeverrryyy DAMN car in a train ... i can't get a year down to when it went downhill ... GOOOOOD LUUUCKKKK !!! ...

crossposted on the Eastern Forum

Posted from Android

I say early to mid 90's, not coincidentally about the same time the internet became popular...

I agree.  Prior to the mid-90's my photos show very little.  Chalk drawings like Herbies and Big Ed were pretty common though.

Bill Miller
Galt, ON

Might as well add, when did it 2) migrate to locomotives and 3) when did the railroads (hint, UP) stop mitigating this?

Which kind of begs the question, when will graffiti on trains fall out of fashion?

I wonder if we should have a separate graffiti forum within this site? Come to think of it, no one else is worried about it----why are we??

It was after 1995. The 1995 Trains magazine special issue with UP: Super Railroad on the cover had a center spread with a photo of every freight car in a 100+ car general freight train. I do not believe a single car had graffiti. However, by 2000 the infestation had begun in earnest.

It will end once the LCD society that the USA has become ends. If the current policy from the past few administrations out of DC is any indication, do not expect changes soon.

Jay

CSX_ENG Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I wonder if we should have a separate graffiti
> forum within this site? Come to think of it, no
> one else is worried about it----why are we??

i'm not worried abour it ... it can't harm me ... i just hate it ... i hate looking at it no matter bow taleneted the criminal is ....

garr Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> It was after 1995. The 1995 Trains magazine
> special issue with UP: Super Railroad on the cover
> had a center spread with a photo of every freight
> car in a 100+ car general freight train. I do not
> believe a single car had graffiti. However, by
> 2000 the infestation had begun in earnest.
>
> It will end once the LCD society that the USA has
> become ends. If the current policy from the past
> few administrations out of DC is any indication,
> do not expect changes soon.
>
> Jay

that's the closest timeline i have seen Jay ...

Posted from Android

I'm pretty sure it was also around the mid 90s that some college kid tried to graffiti something in Singapore..... and found his own hide getting "tagged".   I wonder if Singapore has a lot of problems with graffiti. 

I wonder how they can tag a entire autorack top to bottom with large letters without getting caught.

Just about the time RAP=CRAP "music" got popular.

Adam

Not on a freight car or locomotive, but here's the first example of spray-can vandalism I observed and photographed--on a SEPTA bus in Philadelphia in Sept. 1971.  I didn't go to New York  City on that trip, so I don't know if that's where the plague started.

---

The beginnings were the early 90's, with it really picking up by the mid-90's.   The bulk of modern railroad graffiti patterns mimic the growth spurt of gangs in urban and suburban cities.   About the only "positive" with the SP dying is they went out  with only a couple of years's worth of tagging marring their trains.    

I live in South Florida and I have noticed that  FEC's locomotives never have graffiti on them.

I would have to say the graffiti problem probably started showing up in the mid-'90s, but didn't really get bad until later in the decade. You really didn't see all that much of it until around 1997-'98, and then it really took off from there. Up until the 1990s, about the only graffiti I ever saw on rail cars were the "Waterbed Lou" markings that used to show up on SP boxcars all the time back in the 1980s.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/27/15 08:29 by modoc_line.

In the 60's and 70's, chalk was used by railroad employees to mark destination stations right on the cars themselves for use in switching.This was during the period when railroads were finding the ACI systems to be unreliable, and AEI hadn't yet been invented.  The manual system of car inventory was still alive.  Occasional tags were observed in chalk and usually felt to be the work of employees.  There was a common one named "Bozo Texino" a character in a sombrero and serape, seated at the base of a palm tree.  He was actually very similar to Santa Fe's "Herbie" kind of a safety figure.  From the later 70's into the 90's a character appeared named "Coal Train".  He wore a western hat with flat brim, and had a long beard.  He could be found in chalk, or sometimes in white paint.  White paint is common on railroads, as it is used in stencilling test and certification dates on cars.