Read time: 5 min.

I work at the only factory in my company equipped to send and receive materials by rail. At the risk of sounding like a dweeb, I love seeing all the graffiti as it comes and goes! I’ve shared photos of our incoming railcars occasionally, but last month I predicted that new installments would slow as the year winds down. I was wrong. Railcar spotting continues! 

I’m the production planner for a factory that makes polypropylene compounds. Although we receive a lot of specialty ingredients in trucks, all our heavy-hitter resins come by rail. Each car holds about 190,000 pounds of material. We use a lot of it!

Our three-track yard holds about sixty covered hopper cars. Last month, we were nearly at capacity! I expected only a trickle of new shipments through the end of the year, and I was right: for most of the month, the ‘RNA’ tag above was the only new graffiti I saw.

I’m not exactly a passive observer in the process, though: I can’t tell the plant to produce Product X on Line Y if we don’t have the necessary ingredients, so part of my job involves requisitioning them. On Thursday, we received a big shipment to prepare us for our end-of-the-year sprint.

I was happy to see that our October receipt was jam-packed with interesting tags. The majority of cars were receive have some sort of graffiti, but it’s not always compelling enough to trip my trigger. We received seven cars worthy of documentation between May and August, and eight more in September. If the month ended today, I’d be happy with October’s haul.

The office I work from is a stone’s throw from the rail yard, so it’s easy to take photos of the cars on our easternmost track as I return from lunch. Unfortunately, the graffiti’s almost always partially concealed by a security fence. It’s good that our unloading system stretches between tracks one and two. A quick duck and dive is all it takes to access the middle in search of unobscured art!

I keep calling graffiti “art.” Whether it is or not depends on your perspective, and probably, the circumstances surrounding it. I don’t have a strong opinion one way or another, but I think there’s a gulf between the simple tags and vandalism I don’t bother taking photos of and the intricate pieces I do.

A buddy of mine is a retired engineer. He says graffiti is far more common today than in his day, which wasn’t all that long ago. There’s no question that street art has gained more acceptance in the mainstream art world in recent years, but I doubt that’s what’s up on the railroad. My friend attributes its increase to the typical corporate stuff like cost-cutting measures that lead to a decreasing sense of brand identity.

Like many things, there’s a spectrum within the world of graffiti that ranges from pure vandalism to highly artistic work. I’m not qualified to rate or interpret the pieces I feature here, but I’m always excited to see a delivery of cars show up.

A new shipment came in on Monday, and I was greeted by a couple new cars with some exemplary pieces. Here’s one of them. I love the block letters of the BURN tag and how they contrast with the pink and green that separates them from whatever the art to the left says. MAGS? MAGR? I don’t know.

October has blessed this project with an abundance of great tags. I’ve been pleasantly surprised! I still expect our shipments will slow as we round out the year, but I’m excited to compile a top ten list of my favorites in December or January. Our railcar art never fails to catch my eye!