Rachel Heath

Said the following about Tyne Yard Street Art Project:

“This project gave Network Rail the opportunity to make a positive improvement to the Tyne Yard depot and to reinforce how important staying safe is to everyone. Tyne Yard has frequent reports of trespass by young people, many of whom were painting graffiti on bridges. In June last year a teenager was badly burned and his friend was also injured by the overhead line equipment after they climbed on top of a wagon.

Dougy Blakeley from High Output (NR) lead the team along with Vicki Beadle, Community Safety Manager and Tom Brand, Maintenance Protection Coordinator. They also had support from the BTP and DBS and the company used was Urban Art Yard – lead artist was Gary Bowron who created designs of street art for use on the bridge.

Gary is a well-known graffiti artist and respected by many young people for his artwork. The idea was to make the area more visually appealing to deter future graffiti because young people are less likely to tag over another artists work. By deterring young people from vandalising the railways meant they were also reducing the risk of trespass onto the site, therefore not putting their lives at risk. The street art gave NR the opportunity to include safety messages within the work, so part of the meetings with Gary was to ensure that NR were able to promote our safety campaign for young people Rail Life on the public-facing walls and our own internal safety campaign on the walls which face into the site.

Since the artwork has been completed, there have been some very favourable comments received within NR when an article featured the Project on Connect, and since the completion there have been no further incidents of trespass reported or vanadlism to the art work.

An excellent example of engaging with the community to promote Railway Safety!“