{"id":170730,"date":"2025-05-09T10:17:54","date_gmt":"2025-05-09T14:17:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=170730"},"modified":"2025-05-15T14:28:27","modified_gmt":"2025-05-15T18:28:27","slug":"the-hobo-handbook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/05\/09\/the-hobo-handbook\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hobo Handbook"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Between Bakersfield and Fresno, California. Photograph by Rondal Partridge, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Public domain.<\/p><\/div>\n

The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars<\/em>, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover<\/em>. Both are a misdirection, intended to keep the wrong people\u2014cops, journalists, nosy normies like me\u2014from realizing what they\u2019re holding. The Crew Change Guide is a set of best practices and guidelines for hopping freight trains anywhere in the U.S. and Canada. A \u201ccrew change\u201d refers to a train\u2019s personnel shift, a brief window of opportunity for those brave enough to take it. In the heist movie, this is that ten-second gap after the night watchman clocks out and before his replacement takes over. For a train hopper, it\u2019s a rare chance to clamber up a wagon undetected. <\/p>\n

The Guide is either the train hopper\u2019s Bible or an outdated relic, a must-have or a crutch, depending on whom you ask. The subtitle dubs it \u201cAn Alternative Hiking and Camping Guide,\u201d but you won\u2019t find any trail maps inside. Instead, what you see in these unstapled pages are dense walls of highly acronymized text in a miniature nine-point font. \u201cEast Joliet YD is becoming a major CN GM YD and c-c point for thru trains,\u201d reads a line headed \u201cGibson City.\u201d \u201cE. Jackson crosses over S end of YD IM NE of DT.\u201d The acronyms are more shorthand than code, a way of packing as much information as possible into 154 pages. The aesthetic ethos here is lightness, economy, discretion.<\/p>\n

The first Crew Change Guide appeared as a partly typed, partly handwritten pamphlet in 1988. The true identity of its author, a reclusive seventy-six-year-old Vietnam veteran known only as Train Doc, is as fiercely protected as the Guide itself. Train Doc disguised his voice for his sole interview<\/a>, and of the three people I’ve spoken to who claimed to know him, none agreed to go on the record. The most consistent report about him is that he is remarkably litigious\u2014he\u2019s purported to threaten anyone and everyone who uploads the Guide to the internet with copyright infringement.<\/p>\n

True or not, the document remains conspicuously absent online. It exists only in the physical, and this scarcity has made the Guide a sacred writ to train-hopping circles across the country. Scans have been known to surface on the darknet now and then, and scammers exploit the unmet demand by selling bogus pdfs of blank pages and blurry photographs. Train Doc, however, insists on keeping the Guide free and \u201clow profile.\u201d \u201cIt is not meant to be sold for more than the price of copying,\u201d he writes in the introduction. \u201cOnly give copies to riders who will be responsible.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are other texts in this misfit family (I\u2019ll call them folk texts, for lack of a better term), though by definition they\u2019re not easily discovered. The Israeli Traveler’s Book is perhaps the most organic and decentralized<\/a> example. A sort of unofficial Green-Book<\/em> for Jews, it served to identify safe, unprejudiced restaurants, bars, and hostels in Latin America in an age before Google Reviews. That\u2019s the primary purpose of a folk text: to pass from hand to hand the secret knowledge of the marginalized and the outcast. Many of our ancient scriptures, including parts of the Bible, would once have fit this description. You can\u2019t buy such a book, can\u2019t download it, can\u2019t trace its often multiple authors. But if you run in the right circles, all you have to do is ask.<\/p>\n

Kai Carlson-Wee is somewhere near the center of the right circles. I first met him at Hippie Hill in San Francisco almost ten years ago. A poet, Stegner fellow, and Stanford lecturer, Kai started riding freight in his twenties and had just published his first book, Rail<\/em>, a kind of love letter to the open road. \u201cPart of the fun of reading the CCG,\u201d he told me, \u201cis imagining the riders who scouted the yards, rode the lines, and went through hell and high water to catalog everything \u2026 Train Doc spent years riding trains around the country, taking notes, coordinating with other riders to keep things current.\u201d New editions trickle out each year, photocopied in public libraries and private offices around the country to keep up with ever-changing train schedules. On the first page, there\u2019s a caveat\u2014\u201cSome info included is sure to be out of date and innaccurate (sic)\u201d\u2014followed by a warning: \u201cRiding trains can be dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

For the average Joe, train hopping is an all-risk, no-reward activity. There\u2019s the danger of arrest, obviously, but also of serious injury or death. Stories of train track amputations are a common feature of local news stations everywhere. Why toss the dice for the privilege of a slow trip on a jerking, whining, uninsulated slab of steel?<\/p>\n

As a kid who grew up reading Jack Kerouac and Jack London and listening to folk music, the answer was obvious. I\u2019d fantasized about riding freight since watching Into the Wild<\/em> at thirteen. At twenty I got my first chance to try it. I\u2019d moved to New Orleans to write for a local magazine and stumbled onto the city\u2019s transient underbelly by accident. Traveling buskers were everywhere, their hands black with soot and train grease. From my backyard in the Saint Roch neighborhood, I could see packs of young people with banjos spilling out from the Oliver Yard in broad daylight. New Orleans is one of the country\u2019s biggest hubs for illegal train hopping. It\u2019s the vagabond\u2019s answer to the Denver Airport. But it\u2019s not just the visibly grimy or the voluntarily homeless who ride trains. I soon learned that all three of my housemates\u2014working artists buying groceries and paying rent\u2014had at one point each had their own train-hopping experience. I asked my then girlfriend if she\u2019d consider hopping a train with me, but she wasn\u2019t especially interested. She\u2019d done it already.<\/p>\n

On a walk by the levee one autumn day in 2015, I passed a crawling freight car and jogged beside it for a while. I reached out and grabbed hold of the steel ladder and tested what it would feel like to pull myself up on the fly. I didn\u2019t know where the train was going or how I\u2019d get off. I didn\u2019t even know what the penalty was for such a trespass (anywhere from three hundred dollars to ninety days in jail). After a hundred yards or so I let go and watched the last of the cars rumble away.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

It was my girlfriend who first told me about the Guide. That word, guide<\/em>, seemed to promise so much. I pictured a manual with step-by-step instructions, illustrations, tips and tricks. I sniffed around for it among my housemates, their guests, anyone under forty who rolled their own cigarettes and smelled unwashed.<\/p>\n

The etiquette around giving and receiving the Guide is inconsistent, to say the least. For some, it\u2019s a commodity. Among true believers, it\u2019s a rite of passage. Generally, the recipient raises their right hand and swears some kind of oath in which secrecy and discernment are common themes. They promise never to give it to children, cops, strangers, et cetera. To dispose of it by fire whenever possible. Sometimes there are witnesses.<\/p>\n

The swearing-in ceremony typifies the central tension of the train-hopping community. The irony of anarchists imposing a structure on the clutter of the information age is apparently lost on the propagators and protectors of the Guide. These are people who preach the porousness of private property while guarding the gates of their church. Trespassing isn\u2019t a sin to them, but copyright infringement is. It\u2019s a symptom of the kind of tribalism that permeates the corners of so many subcultures. To spend any time on the relevant forums and discussion boards is to encounter a familiar brand of gatekeeping, mudslinging, and divisive rhetoric.<\/p>\n

\u201cYOU WILL NOT LEARN HOW TO HOP FREIGHT FROM THE FUCKING INTERNET!\u201d reads an average response to a Redditor\u2019s request for advice.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think you should find something else to write about,\u201d another user warned me in a private message, claiming he and Train Doc were \u201cconnected in some ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of these standoffish types identify as something of a victim group, an endangered community insulating itself from the brutality of a capitalist police state. They\u2019re modern-day outlaws, rebels without a cause, and everyone else is either a \u201chousie\u201d or an \u201coogle\u201d\u2014a square or a tourist.<\/p>\n

I was undeniably both when I made the move out to the Pacific Northwest in 2016. I\u2019d done my share of hitchhiking and van-dwelling by then, but my parents were paying off my student loans. I found work as a baker in Eugene, Oregon, and gave a friend $275 each month to rent out an insulated plywood shed in her backyard. I took to walking the train tracks at night, learning the routes and schedules and watching the gutter punks scurry out noiselessly from under a bridge near the rail yard. I even packed a sleeping bag once and spread it out on the bucket of a parked grainer\u2014a train car with a small covered porch. I lay there in the dark for hours before stumbling home at first light. The train hissed and sputtered but never moved an inch.<\/p>\n

When I relayed this latest disappointment to a friend, he finally pitied me enough to give me his copy of the Guide. He was a mid-thirties seasonal firefighter with a long blond mullet and a black canvas jacket he rubbed with beeswax to waterproof it. He handed me a bundle of unbound pages. No raising my right hand, no oath, no witnesses. \u201cI think you need it more,\u201d he said, tossing the bundle in my lap.<\/p>\n

Kai Carlson-Wee\u2019s initiation looked much the same. It took him about a year to get a copy of a copy from a well-connected friend. \u201cReading through it for the first time was like gaining access to a sacred text,\u201d he told me. He kept it in a Ziploc bag and taped the pages back together when they ripped. For him, this marked an induction into a new world. He and his brother, Anders (also a train-hopping poet), had been eyeing the Northtown Yard in Minneapolis, a sprawling, seven-mile industrial zone along the Mississippi River, but the scale of the yard had made it unmanageable. The Guide told them about \u201cspecific streets, specific jungles, specific holes in specific fences,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt helped us tremendously, especially the first few times.\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

I read on my stomach in bed that night. The train lingo was intimidating, but there were also surprising flashes of accessibility.<\/p>\n

\u201cRolando\u2019s Diner is the only decent greasy cup of coffee left in this town,\u201d reads an entry for Binghamton, New York. Another, for a remote outpost in Quebec, stumbles into philosophical territory. \u201cDoes this place really exist? Is it really in Quebec \u2026 or Labrador? Can you get there from here? A train-hopper\u2019s existential dilemma.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Guide signified more than information to me; it signified the courage to act on it. I knew that no guide, no matter how detailed or digestible, could substitute for experience. But I returned to it again and again over the following days, craving some conclusive invitation. A word, a sentence addressed directly to me. It occurs to me now that maybe riding trains was never what I really wanted, that maybe it was always more about being someone<\/em> who rode trains, but at the time it felt like an honest calling. I hadn\u2019t considered that those disclaimers at the start of the book (\u201cThis guide is not intended to encourage people to hop trains and is for informational purposes only\u201d), those warnings online, the reluctance to give out the Guide\u2014all of this was meant to keep people like me from doing something stupid.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Crew Change Guide can save you a lot of frustration,\u201d Kai told me, \u201cbut it can’t actually teach you what riding trains is about. If I had waited around for the clouds to part and the train gods to usher me into their secret cult, I would have never started riding trains. Nothing could have reasonably prepared me.\u201d<\/p>\n

I stuffed the pages between hardcovers in my bookshelf and planned to revisit them when the time was right. With work and holiday travel and my disintegrating relationship, I had enough on my plate. I found myself avoiding the tracks on my nightly walks, took up motorcycle riding to get my thrills. There was comfort in the thought that I had some forbidden knowledge. That I could use it to disappear at a moment\u2019s notice. I never relinquished my desire to hop a train, I just stopped pursuing it.<\/p>\n

These days the Guide\u2019s value is largely nostalgic. A souvenir of a short time\u2014thirty years at best\u2014when the printed word held disparate people together. Train hoppers still exist. Many have migrated to niche forums and message boards to stay connected. Some even thrive as influencers<\/a> on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, where millions can watch their adventures from home.<\/p>\n

Kai suspects that, in the future, the Crew Change Guide will exist as a Google Doc or some kind of open-source document. Though there are still debates about the effects a widely accessible, digitalized Guide will have on the scene, the point is somewhat moot. \u201cThe last time I was riding trains,\u201d Kai told me, \u201ceveryone was using Google Maps.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jeremiah David is a graduate of the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop. His work has appeared in <\/em>Salon, <\/em>Camas,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>The Indianapolis Review, among\u00a0other publications. <\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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