For many, the genesis of graffiti revolves around the train painting era in NYC, for most New York Writers fully fleshing out pieces on a subway car for commuters to see is a thing of the past, some local writers will still leave scratchies and small tags on the trains but train writing is hardly what it used to be… in New York.
In many countries globally, and in even more cities the train writing scene is as alive and well as it was in the good ole days of New York. Countries like Greece and Romania seem to have an active Metro writing scene likely because they don’t have the infrastructure to continuously clean the vandalized cars.
Greece
Romania
With that said, a variety of major European cities have an active train writing scene, I can’t speak to the typical punishments but I can say based off layup setups and stop to stop transfers seem to make it a lot easier to paint in most parts of Europe than New York City.
Also, contrary to NYC, it seems as though most major metropolitan areas will still run painted trains to prevent any delays in their system. New York will send a painted train express from the layup to the cleaning yard leaving a very small window to see them after being painted, and taking away some of the satisfaction of painting a train.
Some of the most notorious train writers such as Utah and Ether certainly deserve their props paving their way through multiple continents leaving multiple metro systems wrecked in the process, everywhere from India, to China, to NYC, Australia, Jordan, Turkey, etc on and so forth. One of my favorites lately has been American writer Konqr although I’ve seen the bulk of his work in Europe despite being well aware he too has hit trains in multiple countries and continents.
One of the things I admire most about his style of painting is his ability to make it happen regardless of the layout, time constraints, or whether he's solo or not. I’ve included some incredible references to this.
The reason painting trains inspires me is, it requires more determination than your standard street bombing. Painting city or government property is a certain way to attract some attention from the wrong people and having such a devotion to it that you’re willing to not only deal with the potential consequences but also document everything yourself on video that could potentially be used as evidence. I can almost compare seeing a piece go by on a passing train to running a rake through a reiki garden, beautiful and finite.
Please consider this as you review this short list of some of my favorite train painting videos by Utah, Ether, Konqr, Daor, and more…
