Nostalgia & History > 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 !!! ...

Posted from Android

I hate the graffiti!  I've always thought if these dipwads would put that energy into something positive, who knows what they could accomplish.
A few years ago, some punk got hit while he was tagging cars and you'd thing it was the end of the world, such a talented artist lost, yada yada.
He was trespassing and defacing private property.  He was a vandal.
 

Frisco1522 Wrote:
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> I hate the graffiti!  I've always thought if
> these dipwads would put that energy into something
> positive, who knows what they could accomplish.
> A few years ago, some punk got hit while he was
> tagging cars and you'd thing it was the end of the
> world, such a talented artist lost, yada yada.
> He was trespassing and defacing private
> property.  He was a vandal.
>  


we share the same sentiment but i'm trying to figure out when the paint companies realized they hit the motherload windfall with all this graffiti crap and when the trespassing criminal taggers took to the darkened rail yards to spread their propaganda

Posted from Android

Early 90s

WAF Wrote:
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> Early 90s

hmm I seem to recall the UGLY freight trains began around the year 2000 here in northern California.
I used to really LOVE the picture PERFECT--SPOTLESS  freight trains of the 1980s on Tehachapi and the rest of California.
They also had really--really BEAUTIFUL train horns in those good bygone days of the 1980s in the western USA.
We have been ROBBED of a lot of beauty in the past 20 to 30 years society wide in the USA.
I must admit that this touched a wee bit of a nerve with me.
This is a very GOOD post to keep a good historic record.
---- Daniel
 



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 05/26/15 17:59 by daniel3197.

daniel3197 Wrote:
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> WAF Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > Early 90s
>
> hmm I seem to recall the UGLY freight trains began
> around the year 2000 here in northern California.
> I used to really LOVE the picture
> PERFECT--SPOTLESS  freight trains of the 1980s on
> Tehachapi and the rest of California.
> They also had really--really BEAUTIFUL train horns
> in those good bygone days of the 1980s in the
> western USA.
> We have been ROBBED of a lot of beauty in the past
> 20 to 30 years society wide in the USA.
> I must admit that this touched a wee bit of a
> nerve with me.
> This is a very GOOD post to keep a good historic
> record.
> ---- Daniel
>  
RG3086 was heavily ghetto painted in the mid to late 90s

I recall cars being fairly clean well into the 90s.  I do remember graffiti starting to show up a little in the late 90s.  Basically, "tagging" is considered a subset of hip hop culture by most who do it, so whenever rap music became a big mainstream thing culturally, you can bet that's when every kid grabbed a can of spray paint and walked down to the nearest siding.  So, I would bet by the early 2000s you've got a bunch of tagged cars on every train.  My biggest heartbreak was seeing a huge cut of Rock Island cylindrical hoppers, all painted in bankruptcy blue "The Rock" scheme, get attacked and destroyed over the course of several weeks about ten years ago.  The work was done by absolutely talentless hacks.  Here were these rolling bits of industrial history, earning their keep for us all to enjoy.  They were prime examples of vintage design with their stylized lettering and 70s "baby blue" paint scheme.  They were living history as well as useful pieces of industrial commerce.  Not to mention they were private property. These cars were selfishly vandalized by a bunch of spoiled little pricks who are just incipient yuppies anyway and in a few years time they probably had no use for hippity hoppity music and would have considered such affectations of the "urban" lifestyle to be gauche and beneath them.  

Graffiti occurred as a sequence, not an individual explosion. In the 1980s the NYC subway cars had essentially not one square inch, including the front windshields, that wasn't covered in several layers of graffiti. The stations went fmro reasonably clean but very dangerous in the 1970s to almost equally covered in crap and extremely dangerous in the 1980s.

In Califonia freeway signs and bridges started being covered in the early 1980s. This lasted about 10 years getting worse by the day, until there was a cleanup campaign that improved matters for about 3-4 years, then it started over again in the 90s with a new generation of thugs. It got to the point that there were no readable signs of any sort on most freeways. Finally someone thought to try making it actually illegal rather than just theoretically illegal and arrest their asses and throw them in the clink for extended stays. That along with electrified barbed wire around the signs and on all vertical poles seems to have kept the re-application of smut down to a dull roar since.

I expect the freeway and subway taggers then moved on to the railroads, who in the name of Bonuses For VPs couldn't give a rats ass about what happens to the company,  and don't even know it has equipment, as long as they get a few platnium parachutes along the way.
 

i've narrowed down to the early 2000s in my views too ... since i have no photos or vids of my own back then i can only go by what i see on here ...

Posted from Android

I took hundreds of photos in 1993-1994, on the SP in the Bay Area of California. Very little graffiti. Most were chalk marks from "Waterbed lou" and the like. 

Stottman Wrote:
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> I took hundreds of photos in 1993-1994, on the SP
> in the Bay Area of California. Very little
> graffiti. Most were chalk marks from "Waterbed
> lou" and the like. 

Agreed.  Through most of the 90s until the late part of the decade all I saw were mostly similar chalkings from "The Rambler, Port of Beaumont, TX" among others on the SPCSL when I was in college and grad school.  

aaronhanson Wrote:
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> I recall cars being fairly clean well into the
> 90s.  I do remember graffiti starting to show up
> a little in the late 90s.  Basically, "tagging"
> is considered a subset of hip hop culture by most
> who do it, so whenever rap music became a big
> mainstream thing culturally, you can bet that's
> when every kid grabbed a can of spray paint and
> walked down to the nearest siding...


Not every kid, just certain kids. Many people here in Los Angeles celebrate it as an artform, a way for the oppressed and disadvantages to "speak truth to power". Graffiti as a form of cultural enrichment, yada, yada...

I'd say it really ramped up in the late 90's. I've spent much of the last six years traveling 48 states, most multiple times. There's probably as much graffiti on stationary objects (buildings, fences, etc.) in California as the rest of the states combined. It's that bad. Much of the graffiti on rolling stock comes out of the urbanized parts of California, verry little from rural North Dakota.

What I think is interesting is the irony that the implementation of spray paint being treated like a controlled substance coincides with the explosion in railroad-equipment tagging.  At least there isn't a War on Graffiti; if that ever happens, even the tracks will be tagged...

~Joe P.
Hainesville, IL

TheApostleGreen Wrote:
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> What I think is interesting is the irony that the
> implementation of spray paint being treated like a
> controlled substance coincides with the explosion
> in railroad-equipment tagging.  At least there
> isn't a War on Graffiti; if that ever happens,
> even the tracks will be tagged...
>
> ~Joe P.
> Hainesville, IL


That's already happening. I was walking over the Metrolink crossing at Azusa Ave. last week and noticed the sides of the rails had been "tagged". They also get street curbs. Last month a parked police horse in Venice, CA was covered in gang graffiti.

Also, It's not the lack of anti-graffiti effort from railroads at causes graffiti, it's that graffiti is no longer seen (at least in urban Calif) as something that should be curtailed. It is seen as a legitimate means of expression for certain peoples who have been oppressed by the....bla bla bla.... You know the rest. Graffiti is the new normal in New America.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/27/15 12:17 by Geodyssey.

lwilton Wrote:
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> Graffiti occurred as a sequence, not an individual
> explosion. In the 1980s the NYC subway cars had
> essentially not one square inch, including the
> front windshields, that wasn't covered in several
> layers of graffiti. The stations went fmro
> reasonably clean but very dangerous in the 1970s
> to almost equally covered in crap and extremely
> dangerous in the 1980s.
>
I lived in Albany, NY in the mid- to late-1980s.  During that period, I made frequent business and personal/pleasure trips to New York City.  During my first year in NY, I saw many subway cars which were covered with graffiti.  However, NYC Transit made major progress in eradicating graffiti and by 1989, when I left New York, it was all gone.  Whatever one may say about David Gunn, the elimination of graffiti from NYC's subway cars was a major accomplishment.
 

I remember that pretty much anything going into Oxnard, CA in the early 1990's came out with graffiti.  The Leesdale brought them in clean, and they left marked up. Any boxcar with VCY markings was pretty much the first to make the system tour with its markings.

Todd Clark
Canyon Country, CA
Trainorders.com