Freight Trains.

 What is it about freight trains that get my blood pumping? The romance, the mystery, the sheer skill, balls and heart it takes to be a skilled freight train writer. Some taggers and graffiti artists are content to piss around the same neighborhoods all their lives. Tagging the same bust stop benches and bathroom stalls week after week, year after year. Not so for the freight train writer. Here is someone who goes into guarded private property risking life, limb and liberty to get up nationwide. Being known in the hood

 Is one thing. Getting up on freights and getting fame nationwide, well, it takes ones breath away to see the passion and pain poured into some pieces that you see rolling through town. Most all of these are done in the dead of night. Usually with a crew to back you up in case the shit hits the fan. Guards may harass you. Burlington Northern Santa Fe employs guards who use night vision goggle to prevent theft and graffiti. The train yards where trains set overnight is where it all goes down. I know of two I frequent on the north side of Chicago. One is off of Grand just East of Halsted. Usually a couple dozen boxcars just setting out. This is like honey to bears for freight train bombers. They come, unload their paint, take their sweet ass time. Guards creep in cars. No one is stupid enough to roll up on some buck ass bombers in the middle of the night alone on foot. You learn how to fight in the graff game. You could run into another graff crew in the yards. You may know them, you may not. They may rob you for your paint. They may

 beat your ass cause you crossed them out once way back in the day. Or you run like a sissy bitch and spend the rest of your graff life telling people lies about what really happened in the yards that one night.
    Those that get up and get it right are masters of the craft. They are on a different plane than the average tagger. They see the bigger picture. They want some random kid in Oklahoma to bug out when his burner rolls through town and its seen by everyone sitting at the train crossing

 waiting to get to work, school, the store. You wonder who they are. These masters of the freight graff scene. Where are they from? A lot of graff writers don't put a city name on their art. The Nation is their hood. They rock the rails nationwide. They are the stars in this game. Fierce, beautiful, talented supernovas of grace and passion.