One Friday in May 1989, the New York City Transit Authority removed an 8th Avenue C train from service. This, the city said with pride, was the last graffiti covered train in service. The rest of the cars in the city’s massive system had been either replaced or scrubbed clean, the culmination of an unprecedented crackdown on subway graffiti and, it was believed, the end to rolling stock graffiti.
But graffiti as a movement has always been nothing if not resilient and when graf writers were deprived of their favored NYC rolling canvases, they simply moved on to handball courts, alley walls, sidewalks and pretty much any other surface they could access. At around this time, another rolling alternative was developing, one that would take graffiti nationwide: freight trains.
Tim Conlon has been tracking graffiti on freight trains for decades, using it to inform his artwork.
Tim Conlon has been tracking graffiti on freight trains for decades, using it to inform his artwork, including life-size photo-realistic paintings of the sides of train cars marked with company logos and graffiti art, and jumbo G scale model trains embellished with colorful renderings of tags and other aerosol artwork. Conlon’s’ train artwork has been featured in galleries around the world and as part of “Beyond the Streets,” the hugely successful graffiti art show that is just completing a full takeover of London’s prestigious Saatchi Gallery after ground-breaking shows in Los Angeles and New York.
Now Conlon is bringing his love for graffiti train art, including some of his hyper-realistic model trains and his full-size paintings, to a show called “The Future Now” at Julia Seabrook Gallery, 660 Franklin Ave., Brooklyn. The show opens June 1, with a public reception June 8, and runs through July 9. In addition to Conlon’s train art, the show features work by other artists with links to the street, including some secondary-market prints from some of street art’s biggest names including Shepard Fairey, Banksy, Blade and Swoon.
Conlon was but a teenager whose experience with trains was limited to an HO set he had as a child when the NYCTA took on graffiti writers to rid the subway of the scourge of graffiti art. But when he went away to school in Baltimore, in the 1990s, the budding graf artist became entranced by the idea of sending his work nationwide via the many freight trains that passed through the city.
“The idea of using trains to saturate my graffiti name across the continent to spots I will never visit was the immediate draw.” – Conlon
“The idea of using trains to saturate my graffiti name across the continent to spots I will never visit was the immediate draw. It is hard to describe the feeling the first time you see a painting you did from years ago pop up on the other side of the country. It is like seeing an old friend and you wonder where they have been and what they were up to after all this time,” Conlon told UP Magazine.
Conlon was not alone in embracing the idea of freight trains as rolling canvases, as Roger Gastman, Darin Rowland and Ian Sattle point out in their 2006 book Freight Train Graffiti, a seminal tome that is to freight train writers what Subway Art by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant is to their NYC subway writing colleagues. Lots of emerging graffiti artists around the country saw the freight train network as a way to connect with each other and perhaps to honor their big-city predecessors.
“The early New York writers perceived freights as a waste of time.” – Darin Rowland
“The early New York writers perceived freights as a waste of time, something that could easily be replaced by a better use of spray paint like the hundreds of subway cars rolling around the city,” Rowland wrote in a summary of the book posted on graffiti.org.
“The majority of the kids across America already interested in graffiti perceived freight trains as a connection to those New York subway idols and saw it as a sign that freights were worth painting on. This perception was truly validated when kids across the country simultaneously realized that freights do travel all over the country and that they were going to be the next big thing,” Rowland wrote.
Freight train graffiti writer FAVES summed it up this way: “I’m proud to be a writer that knows about trains, that knows about freight-hopping, hobos and streaks, and different rail lines. I have a genuine interest in the railroad, the travel, and the circulation.”
Freight train graffiti has a long history, dating from the early years of railroad commerce, when hobos who hopped trains to get around the country began writing messages and their names to communicate with other members in their far-flung fraternity. But it wasn’t until after the emergence of graffiti as an art form in New York’s subway and the subsequent crackdown that freight trains really took off as an alternative.
“If we skip a few beats and simplify the story,” Conlon said, “these oil bar and marker monikers evolve and become larger tags with the advent of spray paint. The names move to commuter trains as graffiti writers are attempting to spread their name “all city.” As authorities crack down on the painting of subways, graffiti moves back to the streets and freight trains.”
“As authorities crack down on the painting of subways, graffiti moves back to the streets and freight trains.” – Conlon
The similarities between freight graffiti culture and that of the early NYC graffiti writers is made clear in the 2021 Showtime documentary Rolling Like Thunder, that was produced by Gastman, the graffiti-street art authority and empresario who curated the Beyond the Streets exhibition.
A few subway graffiti greats, including Zephyr, Lady Pink and Iz the Wiz, made forays into the freights graffiti community. Zephyr described his introduction to this new graffiti world by Lady Pink and Smith.
“One night in early ‘93 Pink and Smith took me to a freight yard in Queens.” – Zephyr
“One night in early ‘93 Pink and Smith took me to a freight yard in Queens,” Zephyr recounted. “On a very cold night in Long Island City I got my first lesson in freight painting….I had a really hard time with painting freight trains at first because they rarely offer a smooth surface,….dealing with all the ridges and hinges and handles really threw me off. I didn’t like painting them at first but over time I definitely caught the bug. And, as they say, the rest is history,” he said.
Conlon, who caught the same bug a bit earlier, continues to serve his zest for freight train graffiti through his art practice. His paintings on canvas are close to life-size depictions of portions of freight cars complete with company markings, weathering and graffiti. His G Scale trains, meanwhile, are masterworks of realism down to the faded and peeling paint, spots of rust and corrosion, dents and dings.
In 2011, Conlon was curating a survey of model trains with graffiti pieces for Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s, Art in the Streets, exhibit. With the help of a group called The Weathering Shop, Conlon got the train cars looking authentic and then had graffiti artist adorn them with their work. These trains later toured with Beyond the Streets.
Now, he does the weathering and the graffiti painting himself: “It certainly takes a bit of time to weather the entire train, as you need to take everything apart and use different paint washes, powders, acrylics and airbrushing on certain parts of the model,” he said. For the graffiti, he relies on his CON tag accompanied by characters or themes he previously painted on real train cars.
“I like to resurrect some of the classic Max Fleischer, Hanna-Barbera, and Tex Avery era cartoon characters on these G scale trains,” he said.
The cars that will be on display as part of The Future Now at Julia Seabrook Gallery through June feature characters ranging from a wise-ass teen holding a can of spray paint, to a bathing beauty in a bikini, to an older blues master playing a guitar.
“We’re excited to bring Tim’s freight train graffiti artwork to our Crown Heights gallery, so we decided to build the show around it.” – Nicole ABE Titus, owner of Julia Seabrook
“We’re excited to bring Tim’s freight train graffiti artwork to our Crown Heights gallery, so we decided to build the show around it,” said Nicole ABE Titus, owner of Julia Seabrook Gallery.
“We’ve assembled a group of extremely talented artists, many with backgrounds and styles that follow Tim’s graffiti art aesthetic, so we’re looking forward to a show that appeals to lovers of graffiti and street art as well as other forms of contemporary artwork. We’ve also added some secondary market pieces from some world-renowned street artists to tie the whole thing together,” she said.
