I don't model graffiti so just wondered what is the last year (roughly) before graffiti showed up.
James A Kilroy, tank inspector in WW2 invented modern graffiti writing "Kilroy was here" in the tanks he inspected.
Before that, Hobos had an elaborate symbolic system that they used on rail stock and adjacent structures.
It really took off in the 60's with the generalized decline in morality. Having gone to college in the 60's I can't be more specific as I don't remember much of it.
Hobos and graffiti are specifically banned subjects so read quick before this thread vanishes.
Henry
COB Potomac & Northern
Shenandoah Valley
I got on this thread before it got locked!
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-Kevin
Living the dream.
Kilroy was here is the name of a Styx album... and Mr. Roboto is Kilroy...
Here's the Wikipedia article on the phrase...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here
Steve
If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough!
SeeYou190I got on this thread before it got locked!
No reason for it to be locked.
Mr. Otte is very reasonable when it comes to discussing graffiti. It is very much a part of today's railroad scene. The OP was merely inquiring as to when it became "viral" as it were.
Pros and cons of graffiti are on a par with weathering, ballasting or, dare I say DC vs. DCC
I admire some of the fantastic work done by modelers in replicating present day graffiti. It simply doesn't fit my era.
Regards, Ed
I model the 1940s and 50s so I don't have to worry about graffiti...
It depends what kind you mean. If you mean the old fashioned hobo markings, probably the very moment a hobo picked up a piece of chalk and wrote markings on a train car to send messages to other hobos. Chalk was and still is used by yard clerks and yard foremen to mark cars in yards for things like routing and such. Some even got creative and drew little symbols for cars they handled.
If you mean the elaborate tags and murals I think those started in the 60s and 70s on the sides of subway cars in New York. Gang tags, peace signs, jokes, political messages, Kilroy was here, and other generic graffiti like so and so loves whoever probably started in the 60s and 70s too. But from what I've seen graffiti, especially the elaborate tags and murals on freight cars really became much more common in the 90s and 2000s.
You can model the 90s with very little graffiti then it seem to explode in 2,000.
Larry
Conductor.
Summerset Ry.
"Stay Alert, Don't get hurt Safety First!"
BRAKIEYou can model the 90s with very little graffiti then it seem to explode in 2000.
chutton01 but I cannot say when freight car graffiti (as we know it, with sizable "murals") really took off and became common - early 1990s maybe?
When I first notice graffiti was on cars from the Western or Chicago area railroads and that was in 2,000.
A lot of railroad videos from the 90s shows graffiti free cars.
Graffiti started being common in New York in the 1970s. The subway cars in the opening sequence of the TV show Welcome Back Kotter are covered in it. Also in the movie The Warriors the gang members were instructed to tag everything with their mark. Graffiti didn’t really make it to the west coast until the late 1980s or early 1990s when it started showing up everywhere around here. It’s timing coincided with the popularity of rap music and ghetto culture, crack cocaine, the collapse of the economy and the Rodney King riots. In the 80s everyone in southern California had salmon pink block walls around their yards. By the 90s they had all be tagged with graffiti and then repainted primer gray by municipal governments in a vain attempt to rid cities of this blight. The farther away from major urban cities the longer it took to reach there. Some areas that are more affluent or rural still have very little or none.
Outside of Miami there is very little Grafitti in Florida.
We fight it by immediately painting over it. Most munincipalities have crews that go out and cover at as soon as it is reported. You see the beige paint-outs on nearly every overpass, but very little grafitti remains more than a day or two.
The paintings on train cars are another issue. No real way to fight them
I will say the grafitti murals have become much more funny in the recent years. I saw one painted up like a billboard for The Big Bang Theory, and another like a Skittles package.
Weird.
IIRC "graffiti" is a Latin term, so apparently it goes back to Roman times.
One thing about freight cars is the chalk markings on them were often not done by hoboes (like "J.B.King esq." or "Bozo Texino") but by railroad yard workers. Chalk marks were used in working out cuts of cars to be added to a train, sometimes looking like fractions ("1/8" "2/8" etc. in an eight car cut). I believe railroaders might also mark a car to indicate it had been inspected, or that there could be a problem that needed to be checked, or which train it was to go out on, or for other reasons.
Maybe it is more useful to use the word "tagging" to refer to the kind of graffiti seen today -- the really large and obtrusive stuff that uses up cans of spray paint: the works of "art" as well as the more or less meaningless symbols and emblems and nicknames.
In looking through my rail photos and slides -- I got my first 35mm camera around 1979 -- I am surprised by how relatively little tagging there is in the shots from the decades of the 1980s. There is some to be sure but car after car has none. By the mid 1990s everything had changed. So speaking purely personally, I'd say seriously "tagged" cars were in the minority into the early 1990s but then things seemed to explode, and all the ratios got reversed rather suddenly. It was the untagged cars that became the rarities.
Just one guy's impressions, for what they are worth.
Dave Nelson
Funny thing is that I am thinking of using Welcome back Kotter music as background for video of my subway display when completed. But I have no intention of covering my proto subway in graffiti.
Joe Staten Island West
Kilroy was here...
I keep trying to post a picture of MASH Kilroy was here reference but it's not working, just Google images "mash kilroy" and you'll see it.
Anyone ever hear the story about the conference at Potsdam and the special outhouse for Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin? Stalin was the first one in and when he came out he said to his aide in Russian of course, "Who is Kilroy?"
Graffiti is starting to disapear out in the west, the so called artists are getting jail time now.