Spotters

Reading a few graffiti related threads over at Railforums.

Its quite suprising the number of people over there that dont 

even seem that fussed about graffiti. A few images and comments 

from the threads..

'To be honest, I doubt the public care that much as long as the train isn't cancelled because of it. The trains brand reputation isn't the same concept as a supermarket, for example.'

'I set up a zero tolerance graffiti policy , back in the day , which basically allowed a tagged train to complete its journey (rather than cancell say a peak trip - better a train than no train) - but for the set to be taken out and cleaned asap - even if it meant much swopping around of sets. Graf vandals thrive on seeing their creations out on the road , so spoiling their cred in this way was an attack on them and their egos. Another thing to do was to spoil their "art" by putting a streak of white paint across it (until it could be cleaned off) 

Policy worked well - with only a few major hits - at Xmas and New Year we put on a load of extra security and did not outstable at vulnerable , quieter locations - thus we didnt get a single attack - unlike some other TOC's , who got a lot of trains painted. '

'Nice little port holes they've left for the public to see out of'

'Why clean the graffiti off on the Eurostar line into London? There is a huge amount

of graffiti on the line coming out of Paris, so seeing a few sparse tags on the way into London

isn't exactly going to give a bad impression..'

'This really p*sses me off....  This moron who likes to be called 'Banksy' - his real name is not a secret - is a big part of the problem, and I find it incredible that our misguided society, with it's deeply damaged view of 'celebrity', does everything possible to glorify his blatantly illegal behaviour, which now clearly involves attempting to promote the efforts of other offenders as well. Brilliant. So once 'Tox' is released perhaps he will now make his fortune too, if he can just manage to come up with something slightly more inventive in the future. This man's prison sentence will now be a total waste of time, thanks to 'Banksy' bathing him in his own misguided glory. Perhaps 'Banksy' would be kind enough to reimburse the tax payer out of the fortune he has doubtless made through being a law breaking vandal? For Christ's sake, just go and arrest the idiot, please 

It really comes to something when we start installing sheets of reinforced glass to protect illegal damage to people's property. And we then wonder why we have teenagers daubing their own unintelligible scrawls all over the place. It gave me enormous satisfaction to read the recent story of the Banksy vandalism which was, itself, vandalised, and partly scrubbed away. If we could just to the same to the rest of his, ahem, 'work', and then lock him up, that'd be grand '