Tank cars weren’t much of a problem back when I was working but, the numb nuts loved our covered hoppers. i made it a standing instruction when a car was shopped that graffiti would either be removed or painted over. And many times a car would be tagged again coming “home” from the shop after having paid several thousand to address the earlier garbage.
Periodically I’d receive an email from customer service that a customer was complaining about offensive graffiti on one of our cars. My polite response was always that they should advise the customer to either take a can of spray paint and cover the offensive material themselves or, in a pinch, slap some duct tape over it.
We simply couldn’t afford to remove cars from service solely to deal with graffiti - offensive or not.
I’ve shot a fair amount of train videos for personal enjoyment over the years. When I watch the older ones, it seems like graffiti began to be prevalent about 2004 or so. It seems like it’s been around much longer though.
I want my photos to look real. But that doesn’t mean I have to include everything that fell within the frame. If a power line, say, detracts from an image, I get rid of it. If someone threw their Big Mac box on the roadbed, I feel no compulsion to memorialize it. I zap it.
I want my pix to look real, but they are not always “accurate” in a literal sense. But they depict is true to the essence of what was there and what was going on. I would never, say, change a signal aspect, change an engine’s color, add manuactured background items.
But say the background is beautiful expect for a bright white small plastic sign that says nothing that adds any character to the image. It likely gets zapped. Little zaps are easy. Big ones, naaah, too much work, and too much alteration.
Basically I’m at war with distracting elements. So I try hard not to include them in the first place.
In the 60’s you had to get involved with recreational pharmaceuticals to create the altered reality. Now in some segments of society no pharmaceuticals seem to be required just watching certain TV networks.
I think tagging grew in popularity about the time Banksey became an international thing. The art world has elevated tagging into some form of urban art so now more people think it’s the in-thing to do. Kinda like how riding freights has become a bigger thing with the spread of YouTube videos showing the activity.
I have also noticed that the taggers seem to take efforts to not cover over reporting marks, probably to reduce the chances of them being repainted quickly.
I’ve always assumed it was the railroads that cleaned off the reporting marks as soon as the defacement was discovered, the taggers not being savvy enough to know what they are and what they’re for. But I could be wrong. Someone inside the business would have to tell us.
I like it when they paint the marks on the trucks. Annoying trying to play “find the marks” when they’re 15’ in the air and you’re between cars in a yard.
Our new lanterns are pretty good. Adjsutable LED beam. C-batteries barely last a shift (but its lightweight), and they like to completely explode when they wear out after so many months (think of the Bluesmobile ccene in Blues Brothers), but they are nice when they work.
Moving way back to the discussion of spelling and pronounciation changes, I believe the original spelling of “Pittsburgh” was “Pittsburg,” not the other way around. My pet mispronounciations are “nuclear,” “jewelry,” and “harass,” the latter being commonly spoken with the accent on the last syllable, not the first.
The original spelling was apparently supposed to be “Pittsbourgh” (and the official documents from 1816 apparently have printer’s typos leaving the ‘h’ out…)
As part of the transient simplified-spelling craze around the beginning of the 20th Century, the name was ‘rationalized’ in 1891 to match the general pattern of ‘-burg’ names, following the lead of the Post Office which wanted to rationalize address spelling.
It was subsequently changed back, as early as 1911, and has remained with the ‘h’ ever since.
So what you’ll find is an ‘island’ of time in which the name is officially spelled Pittsburg, although interestingly most historical references aren’t consistent and spell it that way when referring to things in that era.
Pittsburg, Kansas, and Pittsburg, California, and Pittsburg Landing in Tennessee, were as far as I know always spelled that way.
The way I was taught while attending elementary schools in Bethel Park, PA for the 2nd and 3rd grades was that there were numerous Pittsburg’s around the country but there was only one Pittsburgh and it was in Pennsylvania.