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Comment by johncoltrane | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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