Riding the rails

The Western Front ^ | Friday, May 28, 2010 | Celeste Erickson

[Willie Green]

*Editor's Note: The Western Front does not condone train hopping. The activity is often romanticized, but, in fact, is illegal and dangerous.

The train began to stop. Mike Talbott, 25, woke up to the sun beating down and the sound of crushing steel ahead.

Talbott, lead singer of Bellingham band Muppet Fetish, missed his first train, and against his better judgment, took the only other train heading out of Cincinnati.

Talbott did not buy a ticket. Instead, he hopped on a freight train.

“This train was built up of a bunch of cars with giant spools of steel and open tops, but we got on it anyway,” Talbott said. “We were in a garbage car with an empty open-top container. The train stopped, and there was a chute that they were just dumping raw steel in it. We were eight cars away from being crushed by thousands of pounds of steel.”

Train hopping occurs on freight trains, not passenger trains, said Amtrak spokeswoman Vernae Graham.

Train authorities have problems with fare evaders, passengers who go from car to car to avoid paying for a ticket. If a passenger is caught and refuses to pay the fare, the person is escorted off the train and to the local law enforcement, she said.

“A train hopper is someone who rides trains to get around the country,” Talbott said. “Some people do it for fun; some people do it to actually move about from place to place.”

Talbott said he hopped a train for the first time at 14 years old while living in Naples, Italy. He spent three years living there before returning to the United States. Talbott said using the train is more common when travelling from town to town in Europe because the train system is better. Talbott said he hopped...

[glorgau]

The old time description was “hobos”.