04-28-2018, 05:56 PM
(04-28-2018, 05:15 PM)tomh009 Wrote:(04-28-2018, 09:32 AM)ijmorlan Wrote: Anybody know if they have security monitoring it when it’s at Lancaster? It seems to me like a very attractive graffiti target and I understand they watch it when it’s parked near the OMSF.
Is it actually an attractive graffiti target? I thought most of the graffitists (?) wanted lots of people to see their tags, and in the case of our trains, they are guaranteed to be cleaned off before going into use. Now, if it's pure vandalism, that would be different.
OK, that’s a good point. I was thinking in terms of it being an unusual and clean slate for painting rather than just another tank car. But you’re right about wanting the tags to be seen. I believe New York used to have a massive graffiti problem on their subway until they started aggressively cleaning their trains and most of the graffiti went away: knowing that whatever was tagged would be cleaned up before the next day reduced the attraction.
Actually, I recall reading an article that claimed they cleaned the cars at the end of the line, meaning a tag wouldn’t even come back later that day. I now find that hard to believe because unless there is a large cleaning facility at the end of every line and extra trains to make up for the ones in the cleaning facility how would that work? So I suspect it was actually at the end of the day, which is still a large effort but could be done in the yards without making huge changes to on-the-line operations. But I don’t actually know. On the other hand, once the graffiti problem is mostly eliminated, performing a thorough cleaning at end-of-line might be feasible because there will presumably be only a few tags accumulated on one run.