Whats it like to ride a freight train ?

[APOLLO]

Exactly as the title states - superbly made modern day Hobo rides. Some absolutely wonderful HD photography, no narration but major locations are subtitled.

 

YES - It's both a highly illegal and dangerous.adventure, as is mentioned in the many comments, but also it's an opportunity to ride a freight train across the USA whilst sitting in the comfort of your own home thousands of miles away.

 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8XCmWXE2J5dF7wXkzUVHtw

 

 

 

His scenes show the vastness of the USA, from the desserts to the mountains and the flat lush coastal plains of Florida and on to St Louis.

 

Looks uncomfortable on those double stacks though - an empty gon or the end of a covered hopper seem far better !!

 

Brit15

[Night Train]

There seems to be a decent little space to crawl into that's out of the direct sight and wind blast.

[ColinK]

I visited Manggaps Farm railway mseum in Essex recenly, they have a real caboose you can go inside. Comfy armchairs in the gondola, cooker, sink, table, bed, heater. Far better than a British guards van. They missed a trick when they stopped using them, could have been hired out for railway enthsiast holidays, hook it up to a freight train, sit back and enjoy the trip.

[The Bigbee Line]

Not to be recommended. A friend of mine was in the US in the early days of the mendip class 59’s. He was in a big yard out west and a freight came in with a shifted load of paper reels in a box car. Two riders had been crushed by the load. He asked how it would be dealt with. The reply was that the car would be left overnight with the doors open. ‘The coyotes will clean it out....”. Life is cheap.

[The Bigbee Line]

I visited Manggaps Farm railway mseum in Essex recenly, they have a real caboose you can go inside. Comfy armchairs in the gondola, cooker, sink, table, bed, heater. Far better than a British guards van. They missed a trick when they stopped using them, could have been hired out for railway enthsiast holidays, hook it up to a freight train, sit back and enjoy the trip.

Comfy when standing still. The padding was essential when the slack action threw the van about at the rear of a long train. Broken limbs were not unknown.

[Regularity]

Comfy when standing still. The padding was essential when the slack action threw the van about at the rear of a long train. Broken limbs were not unknown.

Same here in the U.K. - and with un-braked stock and loose couplings, even more so.

[johnb]

I've ridden in a caboose on the Illinois Railway Museum track, interesting experience! I suppose that we got up to 20mph in places.. Seats fairly OK but the ride was definitely harsh, quite a bit of slack action as well at times in the last vehicle and the whole train was only 5 vehicles long. Tolerable for a 5 mile long line, but as for an all day, every day job .... well I wouldn't have cared for it!

 

John

[dave1905]

Not only was the slack action rough on cabooses, but rough track could bounce you vertically a foot or more if you weren't hanging on.  While it looks pretty, its deadly boring for long trips, especially if its slow going due to meets or train size. 

 

Riding on cars is no picnic.  You also get all the dust and dirt blowing around.  Combine that with a nice hot summer day and after a couple days you look like you've bee rolling in dirt.  Worst loads to ride were in a gon of small diameter pipe.  If it shifts it can stamp a bunch of holes into a person.  Worst case with that is it doesn't kill you immediately.  Not pleasant.  When I was in Texas we handled a lot of drilling pipe and had a lot of transients riding the trains.

 

Other bad situation is riding inside a car and the doors close and latch.  No air flow, no water, no light and a big metal container baking in the sun.  Had several cases like that.  Multiple fatalities.  On they discovered one with multiple fatalities inside about 100 miles from the state capitol, so the state police asked to have the car move to the capitol and spotted near the police headquarters to remove the remains and do the forensic investigation.