A moving train fills the frame of a shaky video. A ladder looms, and hands grip the rungs. A blur of movement, and you’re inside an open train car piled with coal, trees whipping by on either side.
“It’s super fun,” says Will, whose GoPro camera captured the action. Will is a train hopper and, despite the obvious danger, says his hobby is “kind of peaceful.”
“There’s usually nothing around you except a bunch of scenery and no people,” he says. “It’s a great way to be alone.”
He’s part of an American tradition more than 150 years old. Daring content creators may have replaced hobos with bindle sticks as the public face of train hopping, but it was originally work, not thrills, that drove men to the rails.
Will, aka transient.xplorer , asked to use only his first name because train hopping is illegal. He has traveled this way all across America. Working remotely as a software engineer, the 25-year-old spends his free time combing through open source railway data and online forums to determine which trains to take, when they’ll slow or stop, where to hide in wait and what type of train car to jump into.
“Some trains are bad, like the ones that carry cars, the auto wrecks — there’s nowhere to hide on them. Really good ones are hopper cars, also called grainers,” he says. He also likes cars that carry shipping containers, because they are typically spacious and draw less attention.
“There’s something about it that feels almost like old-timey,” says Will. “I’m not really sure how many things like this exist anymore where you can just hop on something and go to another place, and it’s a little bit lawless in a way.”
It’s more than a little bit lawless. “Pretty much every video shows some kind of illegal stuff,” says Will. And it’s dangerous.
Train hoppers can and do get injured or even killed. A popular train-hopping YouTuber, James “Stobe the Hobo” Stobie, died in 2017 in an apparent rail accident .
The Federal Railroad Administration monitors trespassing incidents, injuries and deaths related to tracks and trains. Numbers for all three categories have been steadily climbing since 2014, says James Payne, the staff director at the Department of Grade Crossing and Trespasser Outreach in the Office of Safety at the Federal Railroad Administration.
Though the data doesn’t specify how or why somebody was trespassing, social media mimicry is a growing concern for the agency. “There’s a romantic side to the railroad,” Payne says. “We’ve got a history that goes way back into the 1800s. People are fantasizing about the railroad.”
The birth of the hobo
The history of train hopping in the American imagination starts with hobos.
Hobo culture was born out of economic necessity in post-Civil War America, says Rod Sykora, who goes by the hobo name “Minneapolis Skinny” and is based out of Minnesota.
During the Civil War, “young men saw different parts of the country that they never knew existed,” Sykora says. “And the trauma of battle drove a lot of people to take risks.”
Economic necessity played the strongest role. “Many parts of the country were experiencing a recession, but other parts were in need of a labor force,” says Sykora, who’s spent decades researching hobos.
Sykora founded the Hobo Archive with Laura Carpenter, a graduate student in American studies at the University of Iowa who studies hobo culture. (She developed an early interest: Her great-grandmother would feed hobos passing through her Minnesota town.) Carpenter sees parallels with digital nomads, who travel the world doing remote work.
“Hobo culture and hoboing is defined by a specific work ethic that relies upon location, independent capability, but also job stability in terms of seasonal temporary work,” she says.
But as the 20th century wore on, restrictions on the railways increased. Faster trains were harder to hop onto. Technology such as body heat detectors made it easier to get caught. Fewer hobos rode the rails.
“The dangers kept an awful lot of people off the railway. At the same time, it suddenly became a different kind of a challenge,” says Sykora.
A life of train hopping
Somewhere between old-school hobo and thrill-seeking youngster is longtime train hopper George Graham, 68, who posts videos of his rides on YouTube . As a child in Wichita, Kan., he yearned for adventure.
“I wanted to ride a raft down the Mississippi, be Huck Finn or something,” he says of his wanderlust. Hopping trains turned out to be the excitement he needed.
More than 50 years later — through a career, marriage and raising a family — it’s still a constant in his life.
Part of the appeal for Graham is the history. “You come to this appreciation for what human beings have accomplished … what those laborers went through to put those rails in place, it’s just amazing,” he says. “You’re traveling over an area that really hasn’t changed.”
As the rail system changed and hobo culture waned, he encountered fewer and fewer people on the rails. “You used to [see] encampments of people on occasion,” says Graham, who now lives in Wisconsin. “You could go down to a hobo jungle and there’d be hobos, and nowadays that’s just not the case.”
The lifestyle is not for everyone, he says. “It’s much more difficult than perhaps the videos convey. It’s hot, it’s cold, it’s rough at times. It’s a terrible way to travel.”
And yet, he says, “It’s a little bit like hunger or thirst. I think as long as I’m physically able and have the urge, then I’ll do it.”
YouTube strikes back
About a year ago, YouTube cracked down on Will’s videos for violating community guidelines. All that’s left on his channel is a video about listening to trains .
Many of his friends also had to take down their content, Will says, and their appeals to YouTube were unsuccessful. YouTube didn’t respond to NPR’s questions about its community guidelines or why some train-hopping videos were removed.
Will plans to keep making videos to share — someday. For now, he says, “I think I’m just going to focus more on the activity itself.”
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