In the early days of graffiti, the ultimate flex in the scene had a name: wholetrain. To paint not just a single carriage but an entire moving vessel from end to end was a feat of scale, coordination, and audacity. Emerging in late-1970s New York, the wholetrain became a rite of passage: it was a moving celebration of collaboration between different artists, friendship, adrenaline, and sheer artistic nerve. When a wholetrain rolled into a station, everyone stopped. It was that powerful.

This spirit of collective creation, risk, and improvisation is the foundation of WHOLETRAINS, a project initiated by Alexandre Farto aka Vhils. He invited close friends, long-time collaborators, and some of the most important graffiti artists today — Barry McGee, OSGEMEOS, and Revok, who in different corners of the world, also grew up working on trains — to take this legendary spirit and twist it into something new. Instead of steel and subway tunnels, the structure unfolds on a long sheet of paper mapping the outline of a real train from Portugal’s Sintra Line.