Over the last 30 years, these disparate styles – intimate, rural hobo markings and bold, colorful urban spray-painted vistas – have fused into a contemporary style that seems to draw equally from each tradition. (In 2010, the Walker Art Center screened Bill Daniels’ film “Who is Bozo Texino?” - one of the best examinations of this phenomenon and required viewing for anyone interested in this history.)ĭecades later, in 1970s-era New York City, kids in the Bronx associated with the nascent hip-hop subculture began spray-painting the sides of subway cars, turning the city’s transit system into a rolling museum of outsider art (covered from both the pro- and anti-graffiti perspectives in the great 1983 film “Style Wars”). As Woody Guthrie-style rail riding became a popular, illicit way for people to travel cheaply across long distances in the early part of the 20 th century, a whole taxonomy of hobo markings began to appear on the sides of these boxcars – like the railroad workers’ markings, these were cryptic notations meant for a specific, in-the-know audience. The first markings to appear on boxcars were made with chalk and pencil by railroad workers, noting arrival and departure times, weights, and other information about the car’s contents for the benefit of their colleagues in distant cities that would be unloading them. This type of graffiti has a long, strange, and thoroughly American lineage. (Of course, MinnPost’s readers being uniformly upstanding, law-abiding citizens, I should not have to mention here that the many, many illegal activities recounted in this piece - graffiti, train-hopping, wandering around rail yards - do not represent the views of this fine organization.) Colorful, larger-than-life train graffiti can be found on nearly every car. Take the Northstar commuter rail past the massive Burlington-Northern-Santa Fe rail yards between Minneapolis and Coon Rapids, or poke around in the rail yards in Longfellow or Northeast, and you’ll come across hundreds upon hundreds of examples. The most obvious physical evidence of this culture is train graffiti.

There is still an active, vibrant subculture of train-hoppers, making their way back and forth across America. All those boxcar kids with dirty clothes and bindles riding the rails helped do a lot of mythmaking. Riding the rails strikes some deep nerve in the shared American cultural experience it’s not entirely inaccurate to note that the modern ideal of the teenager as a roaming, independence-minded outcast was largely created during the Great Depression boxcar boom. They look very much the same now as they must have then, and it’s not hard to start making wild mental calculations about how difficult it might be for you to jump onto one of those boxcars undetected, and how long it would be before you were in California. Trains have been pulling in and out of these yards for more than a hundred years, carrying wheat, fuel, and anything else that needed to be transported between Chicago, Canada and the West Coast. Walking around the yards on a recent Sunday afternoon, alone except for a friend accompanying me, I had a feeling of being completely out of time. The area around Lake Street and Hiawatha has changed greatly in the past 50 years, but the train yards in Longfellow that run parallel to Hiawatha, past the towering Archers-Daniel-Midland silos, look very much as they must have 75 years ago.

Spray painnt person on train tracks