A version of this originally appeared in the 5th edition of PMSLAPS zine.
There’s something I like about being able to go to the same place every day and see new art. I go down to the same spot by the tracks a few times a week and get new monikers and writers rolling through each time. I provide the consistency, and the freights provide the variety. As an observer, I love seeing what’s going to cross my yard on any given day: legends like ICHABOD or mind-bending masters like SLUTO. Each new freight feels like a rolling art exhibit, unknowingly curated for me by the forces of global capital and Class I rail lines’ shipping algorithms. Something about that must appeal to the artists, too. In a recent conversation one the Angel & Z podcast, ICHABOD YME said that one of his favorite things about freights is getting calls from people all over the continent telling them that they just saw his work.
When you’re reading the story of where a car has been and who’s been riding on it, you also have to consider the monikers. For example, a car bearing buZ blurr’s Colossus of Roads tells you that it passed through the Arkansas brakeman’s yard at some point (see Bill Daniel’s “Who is Bozo Texino?” for more on that). Watching from my bench here in Philly, I see Retribalize, Three Sheets, and Creak all the time and feel something like a kinship with them – it’s a warm familiarity when I see their lines on the steel. What really gets me excited is a string of reefers from the south or busted up gondolas from out west because they always have exotic names. If you’re really lucky they’ll be littered with crusty desert critters from a life transiting no-man’s land.
I think there are two things that keep people coming back to freights as appreciators (the only position I can talk about with any authority). First is the iconography. It comes fully ready to be interpreted, there’s no expectation that you’ve seen any of their work before. Freight writing has to be more legible because once the car leaves the yard, there’s no telling where it’s going to go. ICHABOD mentions this in his interview too: his writing style has grown and evolved since he started getting up on freights, but he tries to stick with the same style when he’s putting something on a car so that it can be recognized. Monikers are an even better case study in iconography – rail workers, hobos and tramps all put them up, and none of them are supposed to, so it’s a quick scrawl to leave your mark and you’re on your way. The second, related characteristic of freight art is that it embodies human need for expression. The aforementioned buZ blurr likes to say “the medium is the message”. So what’s the message transmitted by doodles scribbled on massive machines? Maybe that even in the face of an increasingly interconnected, industrialized, and inhuman world, humanity and individuality will always find a way to be expressed. Leaning on a fence in some industrial park that the world forgot while a three-locomotive monster thunders down the tracks a dozen feet away is an experience that you feel from the tip of your nose to the back of your toes. It’s like your intestines understand how much raw power there is in that behemoth, and then it’s covered in the names of people and their drawings – the most natural and un-intimidating stuff ever. It’s a first-order juxtaposition that you comprehend outside of your conscious mind.
