Winter stripped Indiana of its color. Fortunately, the rail yard at work remained unscathed! In February, splashes of saturation transformed the gritty, gray landscape into a feast for the senses. Welcome back to another round of railcar spotting.
I’m in charge of planning for a plastics factory that receives raw materials by rail. I’ve been taking photos of my favorite graffiti on the railcars we receive since May, and I highlight my favorites here every month. January featured the most diverse slate of art I’d seen so far, but our February shipments proved far more colorful. Because of that, I’m featuring a whopping nine cars! I’ve shared fifty-four to date.
The image above is part of an installment that took up the entire sixty-foot length of a car. Under normal circumstances, I’d have no trouble fitting the entire piece in the frame. Unfortunately, the car’s position forced me to snake my arms and phone through our unloading equipment. This truncated view is the best I could muster. Encountering such vibrant shades of orange is rare.
The combination of red and green, such as seen on this railcar, is one of the most iconic and visually striking color pairings. At work, our quality lab tests the color of our finished product using a spectrophotometer. Red and green sit on opposite sides of a color wheel, and one of the things our instruments measure is the difference between that axis. Too red? Bump up the green. Too green? Increase the red. Too blue? That’s another problem.
This BLER car reminds me of tattoos. I like bold designs with thick lines and vivid colors, but a tattoo artist doesn’t simply break out the chisel tip to make an outline wider. Instead, mine used to draw a pair of thin lines before filling them in. I’ve never tagged a railcar before, but I imagine the artist used a similar process for the blues and grays in the piece above.
The colors on this car remind me of the Toy Story aliens. Unfortunately, the pipe in the foreground doesn’t deliver any claw machine spoils. It’s part of a complicated system of pumps, hoses, and tubes that empty our railcars and send their materials into one of eighteen massive silos we draw from during our production process.
I’m always on the lookout for what I call “character cars.” They feature art that depicts people, animals, and other things outside of simple block letters. I’ve seen anthropomorphic boomboxes, gaucho-wearing skulls, and weird pig-like creatures, but this horrific tag wouldn’t look out of place in a Hieronymus Bosch triptych. The lavender is unusual, too.
This piece is downright cheery compared to the car before. I can draw, but I’ve never added our rail yard’s collection myself. In fact, I doubt anyone has while they’re being unloaded at work. The cars we receive come from suppliers around the world before they wind up at the Big Four yard just south of Rockville Road in Avon. From there, they go to another yard in Anderson before they make the trek to my plant.
Another “character car” lurked in the shadows of our raw material silos. I couldn’t fit the whole piece into the viewfinder, but let’s pour one out for NITE, who was twenty-eight or twenty-nine when he died. Notice how the artist left all the car’s technical data and requirements intact by painting around them. I hope that means this cross-country tribute to his fallen friend will last for a long time.
Aside from a one-off attempt during my 2023 railcar roundup, I gave up on trying to decipher car art while I was working on the first post in this series. Nevertheless, I appreciate the opportunity to interpret the meaning of a piece without too much effort. I’m pretty sure the car above says “KOMBAT.” Regardless, the deep green is what made it stand out to me.
The character cars were cool and all, but February’s final tag is an impressionist cityscape. It’s the most striking piece I’ve ever seen! Two enigmatic figures silently patrol the ancient walls astride majestic horses. Away from the shadow of their watchful gaze, a hidden figure adds graffiti to a corner wall. Someone else strains to hoist a bucket to the peak of a towering building shaped like the letter Z. I stared at this car for every time I passed it.Just what is going on?
I don’t know, but I love it. Maybe I’m just dense, but I’ve never encountered a piece of railroad graffiti that hints at a narrative waiting to be unraveled. All told, February was a banner month for railcar spotting! I’m looking forward to seeing what we receive in March.
This was the best installment yet! That one with the washed-out red and green reminds me of the old 2-color Technicolor films of the early 1930’s that used only red and green in trying to capture all of the colors.
I remember your post about that process. It was great! I just posted march’s installment, and I think the selection gave February a run for its money.