172 pages Text(s) by Olivier Monmagnon 21,5 x 24,5 cm Language: French & English Hardback Publisher: Florent-Massot 1996
The first serious European survey of train writing, and still the founding document of the French train book. Monmagnon assembled five years of painted trains — 1990 to 1995 — across a dozen countries, from Helsinki to Rome and from London to Berlin and Paris, at the exact moment the European scene was consolidating its own vocabulary rather than importing New York's. Colour throughout, bilingual French and English, published by Florent-Massot, the Paris house that also put out the early French rap and youth-culture titles of the decade.
What gives the book its weight thirty years on is the interview material: writers speaking, at length and in their own terms, while the yards were still open. It is the source the later French train literature keeps returning to, and the reason it now sits alongside a title like Painted Graves as one of the two ends of the same story.
