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Comment by muddiestwaters | Hacker News Reader

Retired train writer from berlin here, I’d love to hear more stories from you…

Likewise from you.. our first jaunt in the Berlin metro led us to a train laid up near the Opera junction with cops and dogs waiting inside for us to paint, and were thoroughly confused when we didn't..

We usually did our stints at the western side yards, S-Bahn as well. Yorkstrasse, Schöneberg, and all over the city in the end. So many stories of meeting strange people when painting, most of them friendly and not "anti-grafitti", more the other way around, some really helpful people letting you into their homes after being chased by the cops once again. I know of some impressive homeless shelters in old tunnels, not only homeless people went there, but musicans and skateboarders too. The cops never got us, they were always lagging in shape and motivation. One night we stumbled into a yard which was already bombed by the 1UP guys at that time, we ended up doing end to ends with them and doing throwups til 10am. The energy and dedication in those moments i've never found again. Still, i don't really miss laying in some wet gravel for hours full of paranoia and fear of getting caught and beat up. Sadly even finding an archive of photos documenting all this is not really possible, there were too many people involved being too chaotic in the end. A great part is lost and lives only in our memories.

Our stories are probably very similar ;-).

You know… scouting, trespassing, chasing something or someone, being chased, the sounds, the smells, the "tick, tick, tick" dogs make while stamping on floor of a metro car, etc. There are specifics, of course, but the baseline is the same everywhere I have been.

Every metro has its own smell, I assume from the brake dust.

Likewise the quiet moments between action when you're tucked into side tunnels, feeling the breeze and listening to distant trains rumbling by..

Why would you chase someone, as a train painter?

Turf fights?

Yep, chase the toys away from crossing the latest Poet62 piece because they don't know better. There were real feuds between writer gangs, serious stuff til blood was shed and noses bled. Even worse sometimes. Some unexperienced kids were killed by just imitating the train-surfers, without any prep or such. I saw a guy falling four stories from a rooftop down into some bushes, i thought he died. He lived with some broken rips and a hard rash from the safety rope he had handled wrong. I should write this all down in some ordered manner some day...

Some groups were a bit too territorial, yes, but that wasn't generally the case. You would chase other writers to steal their supply, or because they would have painted over your own stuff or were guilty of some other kind of disrespect. You would chase non-writers, like track workers or passengers to have time to finish your piece or take pictures in the yard. Etc.

Someone else in the thread mentioned throwing rocks, it was actually a shared hobby and a universal one at that.

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