Hi guys!
When did graffiti start to show up on cars? It have not always been like that so it must have been started at some point in time. I’m just a little curious…
I guess there were/are two types of graffiti on cars. For years yard workers and other RR employees wrote notes in chalk on cars in yards to help send them to the right place. Hoboes often added graffiti in chalk too, such as “Bozo Texino” or the famous “J.B.King esq.” (which had to be written in one pass, without lifting the chalk). The most recent type of painted (esp. spray painted graffiti) didn’t really become common until around 1970. The big multi-color “art” graffiti probably only goes back to the 80’s-90’s.
Uh-oh… A graffiti thread![:O]
These never go well![banghead]
as far as the Graffitie on the cars…You have Hobo and Railroad graffitie whitch dates back to the 1930s which is the simple non-intrusive oil paint markers…As far as teh graffitie that you see now I would say about 1995 is when you would see the whole train painted up…
My solution to this is simple…Have the graffitie Artistits BUY there own railroad cars and paint them anyway that they want to and then lease it back to the railroads and shippers…[8D]
The horror…[:(]
Well When did they start selling Graffitie Decals for railroad cars?
I first noticed them around 10 years ago.
I agree. I bought some really great graffiti decals on Ebay and have them on a lot of my cars. They make them look real in my eyes.
Alright, I bet I know were this thread will be going. Graffiti always brings out the best topics. [:-^]
It depends. If you mean old hobo style graffiti I imagine that’s been around since the day somebody found a piece of chalk and a bunch of train cars just sitting there. Many yard crews marked cars to sort them out and hobos marked cars to tell other hobos messages.
Eventually chalk gave way to spraypaint As for the elaborate murals those really didn’t start becoming common until the early `80s. A large reason given for this is more and more boxcars found themselves sitting idle with the rise in intermodal traffic as well as the seasonal nature of traffic for most covered hoppers amounting to a lot of dead time for them the cars became easy targets to would be taggers. Gang activity also increased around that time and gang members tagged cars that wandered into their turf in addition to the regularly scheduled breaking into them.
I remember it when I was a kid back in the early 70s, but it was mostly different colored chalk like some of the others have said. We always thought that the spray paint was a sorry thing to do because it couldn’t be washed off. Even still today I’m not into it, but do have one or two cars with the modern graffiti decals on them that I run now and then with a freight mix.
Tracklayer
Graffitti was first noticed just after Kilroy past by…
There is a difference between graffitti and chalked car information of various kinds… maybe Brakie or others can help us out with some of the things that might be seen chalked on cars as RRman to RRman messages…
[:)]
WHOOOSH!
That’s the “giant sucking sound” of breaking the vacuum seal on the can of worms that’s being opened. [:D]
[(-D]
We Were in Tehachapi the other day stopped at the old depot waiting for a train to pass and some of the graffiti was very professional. Next thing we notice we started telling each other " look at this one", or " this one looks good". AND I HATE GRAFFITI! We couldn,t believe someone would steal enough paint and have enough time to paint a whole side of a boxcar. wouldn,t it be funny if we went and sprayed SANTA FE on the side of their house or low rider?
glenn
[(-D] [(-D] [(-D] !!!
You could model that scene! Y’know, a bunch of hoodlums tagging a freight car, while a bunch of train guys in bib overalls and striped hats are painting over the gang garbage on a nearby building with fallen flag logos.
I like the idea of engineers leaving their “art” on the side of a low rider.[(-D] I might have to try and model that!
[#ditto]
That ought to be a riot! I’m just wondering whether I should do that to a Trans Am or a Chevy pickup.
I would have to think that graffiti was put on railroad cars prior or around 1980. If you look at pop culture and places like New York and the subways and such there, I’m sure folks could google it and find tag’s getting done prior to '80’s (did a wiki on it instead)
IIRC “Welcome Back Kotter” went on the air around 1975, it’s open credits showed NY subway cars covered in graffiti. I think that was about the time you saw the change from “Joe loves Mary” or “Class of 'XX” etc. to the more stylized (and gang related?) graffiti we see today.
It’s been there forever. Here are some links to older forms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobo#Hobo_code
http://www.slackaction.com/signroll.htm
I’ve started graffiti-ing cars on my 1914-era layout: I just painted “Remember Ludlow,” on the side of a boxcar - possibly the work of an unhappy miner, it dates the scene, I like to think, to the summer of 1914:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_massacre
I realized that graffiti was a great way of “setting” a layout a couple of years ago, when I was looking at photos in the “Gazette” of an Australian layout that looked indeterminately Teens/twenties-era. On the side of a trestle, an artist had painted “Draft Billy Hughes Instead,” a reference to a crisis in Australia over conscription during WWI. Dated the whole thing for me in a second; it was a brilliant little piece of atmosphere.