NEW YORK, Friday

THE last graffiti-covered subway train in New York city quietly went

out of service today, ending an era of spray cans and screeching egos

that drove many New Yorkers to despair.

A ceremony to mark the train's last journey to the scrap heap of

history was cancelled by the Metropolitan Transit Authority because of

the death this week of a top city official, Schools Chancellor Richard

Greene.

But it is not quite goodbye to ''Taki 137'' and the tens of thousands

of other teenagers who sought an odd kind of immortality since the late

1960s by spray-painting New York underground trains with their names,

their friends' names, cryptic messages and billowing chartreuse

balloons.

There are still hundreds of subway stations that bear the marks of New

York's ''Graffiti artists'' and above ground there are tens of thousands

of buildings that bear the markings of what some call ''people's art.''

There is even a ''Graffiti Museum'' in lower Manhattan that sells

works by graffiti artists and their sketch books.

But graffiti is gone from the 6245 cars operated by the New York City

Transit Authority which are used by three million passengers a day.

All of the subway cars have either been replaced, gutted and rebuilt

or scrubbed clean as a result of a five-year programme that at its

height used 1000 workers.

Spokesmen for the Transit Authority said that now all the cars are

clean and if one is marked up, it will be pulled out of service and

cleaned within 24 hours before being allowed back on the tracks.

''Graffiti on the walls or subway stations create bad karma,'' said

Mayor Edward Koch earlier this week.

The graffiti, often covering every inch of a train, gave an eerie feel

to subway riding in New York, almost like sitting in the inside of

someone's dustbin. The messages were random and sometimes violent

although seldom political or racial.--Reuter.