Grafitti on subway cars crosses the city once or twice before being buffed off with
acid and high pressure water jets. Freight train grafitti can travel across a whole continent,
coast to coast for years, slowly being eroded by the sun and rain.

MOSTLY TRUE is a compendium of railroad grafitti, hobo culture and trainhopping
lore, a retro-styled miscellany of over 50 years of writings, press clippings, interviews
and photos. Looking at traditional odd-jobbing migrant hobos and their modern day
eco-punk conterparts, railwaymen who use chalk or paintsticks to embelish hundreds of
wagons a day with their quickly exectuted flowing sketches and pseudonymous tags,
aerosol brandishing upstarts and contemporary street artists exploring the heritage and
predecessors of their mark-making activites.

MOSTLY TRUE explores the multiple layers of freight train grafitti, which is
complicated and enriched by sucessive generations of moniker-mongers, with pennames
being bequeathed and borrowed, infamous grafitti tags being re-drawn, imitated and
adapted. There's a photo album of train tagging by San Francisco artists Barry McGee
and the late Margaret Kilgallen, who subtly blended their street tagging and painting
styles with traditional freight train grafitti formats, plus an interview with railwayman
Buz Blurr a.k.a. Colossus of Roads, who has for 35 years sent his drawings travelling
simultaneously via the railway networks and international postal art networks, including
some which have travelled through my own letterbox.

The romance of freight train tagging and mysterious identities of some adherents is
clearly what attracted BILL DANIEL to the subject, he's accumulated a wealth of
source material over 25 years of research and by juxtaposing the old and new, genuine
and fake materials with no clear distinction he's careful to leave some of the mystique
intact for readers of this book, as it says on the cover - MOSTLY TRUE.
(Mark Pawson 2010)

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www.billdaniel.net

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