Noah's Train

A train of hope — freight containers painted for Rail Freight Forward at Roma Tiburtina.

Noah's Train – Rome is a mural created by artist Neve in collaboration with Mr. Wany on May 7, 2019 in Roma Tiburtina, on freight train containers for Rail Freight Forward, as part of the Noah's Train European Tour.

Noah's Train is the flagship campaign of Rail Freight Forward — a coalition of European rail freight operators — conceived to advocate for a shift of 30% of European freight transport from road to rail by 2030. The campaign's form is a freight train whose containers are progressively painted with animal murals at each stop across Europe, transforming a working freight convoy into the longest mobile artwork in the world. The concept references Noah's Ark: a train carrying the image of threatened species, moving across a continent to argue the case for the most climate-efficient form of transport. The train launched in December 2018 at COP24 in Katowice, Poland, and travelled to Vienna, Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Rome, Leipzig, Munich, Luxembourg, Riga, and Rotterdam. At each city, two containers were handed to local street artists and painted. The Rome stop was on May 7, 2019 at Roma Tiburtina station. Two containers were painted by Neve and Mr. Wany — adding the snake, the magpie, the wolf, and the butterfly to the convoy. The inauguration was attended by Sergio Costa, Italy's Minister for the Environment and Protection of Land and Sea, and Gianluigi Castelli, Chairman of the International Union of Railways (UIC) and President of Gruppo FS Italiane. Neve's contribution fills two sides of a freight container: a large snake rendered in deep greens, its scales mapped to the corrugated metal surface of the container, its eye painted as a solar disc — amber, ringed in black, the pupil a gleaming crescent. On the adjacent container, a crow or magpie, black and white, wings spread, precision-rendered against a green ground. Neve executed the work on-site over several days, working from scaffolding and from the top of the containers inside an industrial rail depot. After the campaign concluded in Rotterdam in October 2019, the painted containers were returned to operational use — continuing to carry cargo across European rail networks as a mobile monument to the argument they were built to make.