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KaBar

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To bring up a tired old phrase, "Different strokes for different folks." I've been to New York City a couple of times, and frankly I was uncomfortable the whole time I was there. I'd probably be scared shitless in Brooklyn, so I guess we're even. Give me those wide open spaces, please.

 

People adapt to their environment. If you had been raised in Montana, or Texas, or Idaho, you would probably prefer big outdoors places too.

 

If you ever decide to catch out, I'm thinking he best way would be to take a bus over to Jersey, to Port Newark. Take the #40 bus out of Penn Station in Newark to the intersevction of Kellogg Street and Terminal Rd/ Corbin Street. Walk south maybe a half mile on Corbin.Look to your right, you'll see the crew shack and the Stella Maris Chapel. (The chapel has bathrooms and telephones and provides shelter of some kind, but I'm not sure if it's a mission or what.)

Look for an open gate to Dockside Yard. It's to the right of an auto storage yard. If there's a security guard, just tell him you are passing through to the railroad yard are aren't stopping in the auto storage yard, he'll probably just wave you on through. Behind the storage yard there are weeds & junk to hide in. The crew trailer is just to the north of where you will be waiting. Norfolk Southern "23M" IM double stack to Chicago/UP makes up around 7pm (M-F) (Sept 2001). CSX doublestack "Q159" runs about 9:30pm (M-Sat, earlier on Sun) via Syracruse then to Chicago. Trains depart GEO NBD. Arrive early, and exercise every effort to remain hidden and undetected in the yard and on the train. This yard and these IM trains are hot, not only because of IM cargo, but also 9/11. Two strings of cars will be sitting on the departure track in front of you, behind the auto storage lot. They will be made up, and be pulled out of the yard across Corbin Street. Hit a TTX48 (NOT A 53--a TTX 53 HAS NO FLOOR), get in the well and STAY DOWN until you are well away from the New York area. Metro cops and NS bulls watch these rains very carefully. They often "escort" the train in cars. Don't get cocky and BE CAREFUL.

 

There are other good catch-outs in Jersey, including North Bergen Yards, South Kearny Yards(ELECTRIFIED FENCE Sept 2001), Little Ferry Yards in Ridgefield Park, Croxton Yards (between Jersey City and Secaucus), Elizabeth (E-Rail Intermodal Yard and Elizabethport Yard) and Oak Island Yard in Newark.

 

I GUESS I DON'T NEED TO TELL YOU TO WATCH YOUR ASS IN THESE YARDS, THEY ARE HOT AS A MOTHERFUCKER AND IN SOME SERIOUSLY SKETCHY NEIGHBORHOODS. BE CAREFUL.

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  • 2 weeks later...

damn where i live the sketchiest people are either the russians who jump americans....as for as hobos, tramps, bums and transients...I once payed on 5 bucks to be a look out and give me some tips on good spots and how to access em...but then where i live i dont have to worry about a cat turning on me...they are all quite docile...(from seattle all through the portland metro area) and if you help them a little they will tell help you...and some may tell a fucked up joke or two(my favorite part)....hobos are an endless supply of info regarding the streets...use em to your advantage...

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  • 3 weeks later...

if i ever have to sit at tatsie for 9 hours again i may just jump in front of a train on the mian line...

ha-ha.

it got mighty cold when the sun went down on the way north. blanket,sleeping bag, tshirt, thermal top, hoodie..did almost nothing to keep me warm.

brrrrrrr.....

and ft worth is kind of lame..lots of train watching to be done though.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I just got home last night after almost a month of trainhopping. I started off about OCT 20, took Greyhound and met Stretch and Burlington in Memphis, TN. Stretch rode five days from New England to meet me in Memphis. We caught out that night headed to Fulton, KY. Unfortunately, we were both rolled out and fell asleep, and rolled right through Fulton. We woke up in Effingham, Illinois in some rainy, cold-ass weather. We got off, went up underneath a bridge and stashed our gear and left Burl guarding it, and walked a couple of miles to the beer store. We were stuck in Effingham most of the day in the rain, but I spotted an open boxcar in a train sitting in the hole, and we got on it and got off in Fulton that night. We rolled out under a bridge in Fulton in kind of a low area. Woke up in a ditch full of freezing cold water--it rained and the water flowed down from somewhere else.

We stuck around Fulton a couple of days, checked out Country's hooch (it's pretty elaborate for a tramp hooch--it has a barrel stove and built-in bunks and cabinets) then we caught a ride down to Jackson, Tennessee.

Jackson is the location of both the WTNN RR main office (got to watch your step there) and also the Casey Jone's Village museum and railroad display. They've got a steam locomotive on display, a nice museum about Casey Jones, the home he lived in at the time of his death, and a lot of railroad memorablia. A first-class restaurant, too.

The first night we slept in some abandoned tractor-trailers downtown, but the next day a friend of Stretch's gave us a ride across own to Casey Jones Village. We attended church there at the Grace Bible Christian Church (this is a church in the CJV complex that was started and is supported by the Shaw family, that owns Casey Jones Village) and everybody was very nice, despite the fact that we hadn't had a bath or washed clothes in more than a week, LOL. Mr. Shaw gave us an "all-you-can-eat" pass at the restaurant. The food is outstanding--real country style chow served buffet style.

We spent the afternoon listening to some great acoustic bluegrass musicians. We slept in the CJV Amphitheatre. It's a great place. The beer store is at the gas station right next to CJV. (Had to hide the empties, though.)

 

Anticipating cold weather farther north, we went down to Wal-Mart and I bought some Wall's winter insulated coveralls. I wanted Carhartt's, but that Wal-Mart didn't have any.

Next day, Stretch ran into somebody he knew in the CJV parking lot and he gave us a ride back over to the downtown area. The next morning, out at the WTNN Yard, it started raining like hell before the Corinth train made up, so we hiked through the rain to a good, dry bridge on the Illinois Central line and made camp there. We scrounged up a steel bucket and a couple of 5-gallon buckets and spent a couple of days drinking beer, watching it rain and burning up every piece of scrap wood we could find.

We arrived in Corinth, Mississippi and again slept under a bridge. Corinth is a great little town. It has the only solid-concrete hobo hooch I've ever seen--in an abandoned basement/foundation near the south jungle. Stretch and I made another jungle on the north end of town. It's quite a hike to the beer store downtown. The tracks in Corinth had just had a brand-new tamp job and the ballast was all torn up with big gaps between the ties and the rock. It was hell to walk on.

Finally we got down to Amory, Mississippi, where we spent several days visiting with Loco Larry and the current reigning Queen of Hobos, Miss Charlotte. Larry has a hobo museum in his home. Amory is a great town, and has a big Railroad Festival every spring in April. To avoid having to catch out of Ampory, Charlotte gave us a ride to Tupelo. We caught a good boxcar out of Tupelo about 0200 in the a.m., went back through Corinth, and stayed in the northern jungle, then caught out again on the WTNN, to Fulton.

We jungled up under the northern end bridge in the Canadian Pacific yards, and caught a train that went all the way to Markham Yard in Chicago. Again, it was shit weather, cold and looking like rain. The cops told us to move along at the Metra station, they got pissed because we ere sleeping on the lawn, waiting for Milwaukee Mike to come pick us up.

While we were waiting, Stretch amused himself by drinking beer and trying to start conversations with Chicago girls on their way to downtown on Metra. At first, I thought it was a lost cause, but he came pretty close a couple of times (mind you, we were pretty broke, wet, cold, filthy dirty from riding trains---not exactly looking our best.)

 

Mike and his rail-riding partner, Leo, came and got us and dropped us off at the east end of Bensonville Yards. We slept under a trailer, parked under the bridge at the catch-out for stack trains. It was RAINING and lightning and tremendous claps of thunder, but we were safe and dry under there. The next day we went for beer and found the MOST BEAUTIFUL CONVENIENCE-STORE CLERK IN AMERICA. I have no idea what the fuck she is doing clerking in a convenience store in north Chicago, but she was DROP DEAD GORGEOUS. I was like stunned. Mike picked us up later, took us out to dinner (eeww, stinky trainhoppers!) and then dropped us off at the west end of Bensonville, across the tracks from the jungle/catchout. We missed the 1930 GM train, but about 0300, down where the yard feed hits the Main, a Canadian Pacific AC-4400 Big Boy rolled up pulling auto-racks and IM stacks and stopped for the signal. Stretch goes "Holy shit! That's the ___! Nobody every catches the ___!" So he goes over with Burl and shines his flashlight up at the engineer's window and says "Hey, it's awful cold out here! Can we ride that back unit to Portage?" The hogger says "Hey, I didn't see you. Get on." We blasted the 130 miles from Bensonville Yards to Portage, Wisconsin in four hours flat. They were hauling ASS. When we got to Portage, we had to bail off on the Amtrak station side of the unit, because the engineer's side was blocked by a train, so basically we got off in front of the entire Canadian Pacific workforce, including the relief crew, who were like "Who the fuck are those guys?" We just saddled up and humped down to the jungle at the elevators. We spent the next day or some drinking beer and lounging around in the cold. We dumposter-divede the pizza joint's dumpster and scored some great pizza, still warm. It started raining so we had to roll up and cross over the tracks to he Amtrak station side to find some shelter.

There's a great biker bar in Portage. We spent some time in there, warming up and drinking Budweiser. When we caught out, the boxcar rolled up like 50 feet from where we were sitting. We went through a bunch of small towns, including Tunnel City and La Crosse, WI. There was snow on the ground and it was about 30 degrees. We bailed off when she crew-changed outside of Buffalo, Minesota, rolled out in the frost and slept till daylight. In the a.m., we humped about four miles to the town of Buffalo and called our riends in Annandale. Crash came and got us in her $100 car that her family bought from a tramp who used to live up at Boxcar Boys' Ranch in Staples. I was so goiddamned glad to GET A SHOWER, LOL.

 

We stayed several days with Preacher Steve and last year's Queen of Hobos, Half-Track, and their two lovely daughters, Crash and Tricia. Then Stretch lit out to go see his girlfriend in Pennsylvania and I caught a plane off of cheapoflights.com ($165) from Minnie to Houston.

 

Boy, am I glad to be home. I'm too old for this shit. Every muscle in my body is screaming.

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Catching out in Memphis was a piece of cake. We caught out on the Canadian National on the east end of the Johnstone Yard departure tracks (just outside the yard) just south of where Third Street crosses over I-55, a little to the east of the overpass bridge. As long as you exercise some common sense, keep a low profile and catch out at night, there's nothing to it. We did, however, stringently avoid getting seen by any CN yard crews, track maintenance crews and bulls. Travel light, don't build any fires or make any light. We didn't even light cigarettes or anything like that. Boarding the train was easy, but we slept through our get-off at Fulton, KY.

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Emperor of tyhe North is a great movie, just about every trainhopper I ever met loves it. The character played by Lee Marvin, "A-No. 1" is a real person, who rode the rails during the 1890's and early 1900's, but of course, his life was not nearly as melodramatic as portrayed in the movie. He supported himself by writing small paperback books about his life (similar to the pulp "Westerns" that were popular at the same time that depicted the lives of famous gunslingers, lawmen, etc.)

 

There were several other movies about trainhopping produced about that same time in the 1970s--"Boxcar Bertha" starring Barbara Hershey was another one. It was not too great, but everybody went to see it because it had a hot sex scene with Hershey in it. It was more or less a rip-off of a book produced by a famous I.W.W., Dr. Ben Reitman. Reitman was gay, or is suspected to have been gay, and today many scholars think that his book on Boxcar Bertha is really a fictionalized account of his own experiences riding the rails. The other main character in Boxcar Bertha is loosely based on the I.W.W. organizer and union leader "Big Bill" Haywood. Haywood was a larger than life figure who survived many strikes and gun battles with the hired guns of industrialists. (Labor struggles back then were a lot like warfare.) In one famous early 1900's incident in the Wild West mining camp at Goldfield, Colorado, Haywood was involved in a "High Noon" type shoot-out with the secretary of the AFL union. The AFL man was killed, and Haywood sustained nerve damage that left his arm paralyzed for the rest of his life. (It was the custom back then to go armed, and nearly everyone did so, often wearing revolvers in open holsters.)

 

By the standards of those days, modern trainhopping is very safe, LOL.

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what is the best way to introduce yourself and start conversation with a hobo??

 

there is a guy that stays near my yard under the overpass that goes over the yard, and i'd like to get to know him and maybe learn something about my yard from him..i know he is there more than me so maybe he can let me in on something,

 

but what is the best way about doing this?? i dont want to offend him...

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Thisoneis--

 

Yes, we catch out through Louisiana all the time, headed from Houston/Beaumont to Shreveport. Shreveport's Deramus Yard is a major crew change for the Kansas City Southern. and the UP yard sends most of it's trains to Houston.

 

Introducing oneself to a tramp is just like introducing yourself to anybody else, except many homeless people (I'm talking about homeguards here) have a pretty exaggerated "personal space" safety area, and get uncomfortable if you come too close until they feel safe around you. Keep in mind that tramps have a lot of unmet needs. Just like your family considers paying the rent or paying the light bill a priority that must be met, a lot of tramps and hobos feel that way about buying alcohol or drugs or tobacco. Drinking has a higher priority than shelter, a higher priority than keeping clean, pretty much a higher priority than food, at least in the short run, and they do not consider living outdoors to be too high a price to pay to be able to drink like that.

 

On the other hand, they will be more than happy to accept donations from you, usually, and if you aren't careful, will quickly become dependent and entitled. You have money? They need it. You have food? They need it. You have a place to live? They need it. You have warm winter clothing or sleeping bags or blankets or whatever? They need it. And why didn't you bring more, since you have so much, and they have so little? Oh, and by the way, here's a list of things you need to bring next time.

 

It's not so much that they are ungrateful or grasping, but that once you open the door to your generosity, they have endless, bottomless unmet needs, and usually have poor boundaries. Someone told me once he took a video camera into a jungle and was shooting interviews and trains rolling by and after a couple of hours the tramps were discussing how much they could get for "our" video camera, since they needed a beer or two.

 

The best way to approach this guy would probably be with some rolling tobacco (if he smokes) or a beer or two. Keep in mind, if things go South, you may need to haul ass in a big hurry.

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yea i completely understand...growin up with boys from the hood taught me to be sparing yet still generous, maybe he'll take a bag of tobacco and a beer every week....i dont want him to be dependent on me lol. Im still a pretty shy person, and it sucks....haha i guess i'll just have to see how things go..

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Actually, for a rolling catch, that was pretty well done. I hate to commend him, though, for fear it will encourage other people to catch on the fly. Catching on the fly adds a completely iunnecessary element of danger. And this guy was skylarking, too, running from car to car on the tops.

 

I stand by my advice. CATCHING ON THE FLY IS DANGEROUS AND UNNECESSARY.

 

BOARD FREIGHT TRAINS WHILE THEY ARE STANDING.

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