Graffiti on trains is illegal, dangerous, and a U.S. folk tradition that goes back over 100 years.

I enjoy looking at railroad monikers (typically line drawings on freight cars). Just for fun, I offer this pocket field guide to a few popular railroad monikers. Click on the image to get the full size version. It is made to print on 8.5 x 11 inch paper.

You should be able to simply print the full image, but if not, here’s a PDF.

A few thoughts:

• There’s a lot of different monikers. I tried to choose mostly common ones I currently see, given the space I had available.
• Why not just have photographs? I learned with birding field guides that a drawing based on multiple examples can highlight commonalities and attributes to help in identification.
• How to organize a field guide? Originally I thought by subject – such as birds, people, trains. Alternatively, I could go by the moniker’s names. However, I was interested to see how organizing by design complexity would work out.
• I enjoy the book arts and paper-craft, so doing a cut-and-fold booklet was an inspiration.
• I also enjoy breaking the 4th wall of the internet, by providing a downloadable object.
• Released under a Creative Commons attribution 4.0 International license.