(The following story by Rodger L. Hardy appeared on the Deseret News website on December 13.)
PAYSON, Utah — A string of graffiti-covered railroad cars parked on a Union Pacific spur along I-15 in southern Utah County is sitting idle, not because of the tagging, but because of the economy.
Each of the boxcars, many of which belong to Union Pacific customers, probably picked up the urban art along the rail company’s 33,000 miles of track and likely when the cars were in such areas as Los Angeles or Chicago, company spokeswoman Zoe Richmond said.
“The cars are sitting there because they’re not needed,” she said. Ironically, they are parked in an area where tagging is a problem.
A few miles south in Payson, police there say they have a particularly serious issue with taggers. In Payson, graffiti is painted over quickly because it breeds more graffiti, police say. Competing gangs often make threats to other gangs, which in turn are answered.
But rail cars move around the country in the open where they’re easy targets for taggers and where the graffiti is more difficult to remove.
Still, the company considers tagging a serious problem, Richmond said. If any of the cars derail, officials need to know what’s inside, but if identifying placards attached to the cars are covered with graffiti, that could impede an investigation. “They need to know what’s in those cars for safety reasons,” she said.
While Union Pacific and its customers paint over the graffiti on a case-by-case basis to meet safety requirements, “it would take billions of dollars and a small army,” to cover all the graffiti, she said.
“It’s an unfortunate thing we struggle with,” Richmond said. “People just don’t respect property, that’s the bottom line.”