I arrived at the Black Butte Center for Railroad Culture in Weed, California, the wrong way. As I drove up the dirt road where Google Maps told me to go, I found my car impeded by a bright yellow gate and a sign that read “Private Road: Union Pacific & BBCRC Only!” I texted a man called Bruce Shoemaker, who said he’d come down to meet me. I looked up at Mount Shasta and watched a roadrunner kick dust up the path. Bruce arrived some 10 minutes later, a gruff man in his fifties with a tattoo of a train signal all the way up his right calf, and opened the gate. He offered an apology. “It’s to keep the riffraff in,” he said, smiling.
To arrive at the BBCRC the way its core visitors do, I should have come by rail. Specifically, I should have hung around by the side of some train tracks out of sight of any guards and waited for a freight train to slow down, run up alongside it and hitched a ride in any boxcar that had enough room for me to squeeze into. I should have done it, in other words, the hobo way.
For as long as there have been trains in America, there have been so-called hobos, transient people, jumping on to them to get around. Etymologically, hobo might come from “homeward-bound boys”, American civil war soldiers trying to get home or to find odd jobs on which to build a new life after the fighting ceased. By the turn of the 20th century, there were about a million hobos on America’s rails. That number went up to around 1.5 million in the Great Depression, when there was less work and people had to travel further to find it.
After the Great Depression, though, America largely forgot about the hobos, or transmuted them into idealised figures in popular culture. Output such as the Disney film Lady and the Tramp (1955) and the Roger Miller song “King of the Road” (1965) capitalised on a nostalgia for a simpler time, when a man could swing a bindle (the hobo term for a bundle tied to a stick) over his shoulder and set out to find freedom and adventure.
This nostalgia was premature. For more than a century, people have declared the hobo a dying breed (as early as 1907, the labour activist Len De Caux reported that “there are no tramps today”). But although increased security around railroads, cheaper cars and gas, and government interventions such as the GI bill meant that, after the second world war, there were fewer unhoused people riding the rails, hobos have never quite gone away. At best guess — and the best guess is pretty rough — about 20,000 people still ride America’s freight trains, either by choice, necessity or combination of the two. And the BBCRC is one of very few places that exist to serve and preserve their culture.
I followed Bruce, who is a member of the board that oversees the site, down the private road to a collection of vintage boxcars and the odd cabin and workshop building, which sits right up next to the Union Pacific mainline. As I parked, a yellow freight train emblazoned with American flags trundled by, blasting its horns as it went.
“People ask me what it’s like. And it’s not really like anywhere,” Bruce said. I know what he means. The BBCRC is something like a community centre, a scrapyard, a squat, a museum, a gig venue, a summer camp and a refuge rolled into one. It functions as a place for train riders who want somewhere to lay their heads for the night, or to hang out with other people in their community.
There have long been periodic gatherings of hobo communities, the most famous being the annual Hobo Convention in Britt, Iowa, although opinion among hobos varies on how authentic this event is, given that it is run by the Chamber of Commerce and serves more as a tourist trap than a genuine focal point of hobo life. But BBCRC is here all year round. There’s a blackboard of scheduled trains, northbound and southbound, where their destinations, times (some as specific as 5.50am, others just “next week”) and any useful remarks for people hoping for a ride are written up, such as that the train to Portland Lake Yard is often split into two trains. There’s also an outdoor kitchen under a canopy, log benches and old sofas around a fire pit.
A notice board next to the fridge gives guidance on helping out with food and washing up, and asks that if people are staying more than a few days, they clear it with the handful of permanent residents and chip in for basics and upkeep in a tin donation box. “We like to say we have a mission, but we’re not a mission,” Bruce told me. Anybody can hang out here, but management have no qualms about asking people who are abusive or otherwise disruptive to leave.
Today, the BBCRC was mostly empty. Apart from Bruce, I met a young woman I’ll call Allie, who asked not to be identified and who’s been coming here for the past decade, as well as Martin, a middle-aged man who hailed from, of all places, Battersea, south London. He moved to San Francisco during the Thatcher years, and now lives up the road in Weed. He comes here to hang out. “I like to think of myself as countercultural,” he said.
“It goes between being really rowdy to being really chill, it just depends who’s here,” Allie said. Some of the busier times of the year are the so-called work parties, where hobos come from all over to pitch in with maintenance work on the site and play music, drink beer and hang out.
One of the old boxcars, where people put on gigs, housed a painting of a train against a sunset, some guitars and amps kicking around, art equipment and a wall covered in photographs of about 50 people. A sign reads “In memory of our sisters & brothers who caught the Westbound,” a hobo euphemism probably derived from the fact that you can’t go much further west than here.
Naturally, hobo culture has changed significantly over the past century. There are still older “tramps” riding trains, but the days of bindles on sticks have long gone. As Owen Clayton, a British academic studying hobo traditions, told me, “Towards the end of the 20th century, you get more, and I don’t want this to sound dismissive, but more, like, lifestyle transiency.” In the 1990s, people with good jobs and stable homes would sometimes take to the rails for a week or so a year as a way to see the country or cosplay being poor for a while. These sorts of people came into conflict with another growing arm of hobo culture, the railriding punks. The word hobo fell out of fashion with this new generation, replaced by terms like “gutterpunks” and “dirtykids”.
Now, there’s a mix of older tramps and younger punk figures out on the rails. Both come to BBCRC, but it’s mainly the latter, as the older generation ages out of life on the rails. The crowd is also significantly left-leaning.
“That’s because they’re a lot of marginalised people that have been maybe left behind by the regular American programme or have chosen to opt out of it,” Bruce said. They also get a lot of trans and queer people coming, who have found railroad riders to be a more accepting community.
Leftism on the rails has its origins in the 1990s with the punk crowd. “It was like a political movement,” Bruce said. “People were anarchists in a very defined way. They were going to these active resistance conferences in Toronto and Chicago. A lot were radical environmentalists in Earth First, and groups like that . . . Part of the ideology was, freight trains are a free way to get around the country where we don’t have to get regular jobs, we can keep being activists, and we’re kind of screwing over corporate America because we’re getting free rides.” The BBCRC is involved in activism work to support the migrant trainriders threatened with deportation when they are caught by the railroad companies. Hobos are often thought of as lone figures, but they have also always been organised, if loosely. And they are not always strictly homeless. Of the people who come to the BBCRC, only a few spend 365 days a year riding around on trains, Bruce said.
But apart from its social function, the other reason for the BBCRC’s existence is what makes it even more unusual: to preserve hoboing culture and history. There’s a rust-red Central Vermont flanger car that used to be the home of a musical artist called Utah Phillips and is now a miniature museum to him. There is also a library boxcar that houses a collection of video documentaries about the railroads, posters for historic hobo gatherings, art books of freight train graffiti, histories of labour movements, collections of hobo songs and poetry, accounts of hoboing both historic and contemporary, shelves of scrappy zines with titles like Railroad Semantics, and back editions of newsletters such as the Hobo Times: America’s Journal of Wanderlust, published by the National Hobo Association.
The BBCRC isn’t new. For many years, there was a hobo “jungle” (a place where hobos gather to wait for trains) just over the other side of the tracks from where the BBCRC is now. It was a good spot because there was a water tower where steam trains would stop to take on water, which made it an ideal location for hobos to “catch on”, their term for jumping on a train. Hobos who frequented that jungle in the early 2000s noticed that the BBCRC site, then owned by a local towing company, was falling into disrepair. In 2006, when the land came up for sale, they chipped in and bought the plot.
Hobo culture intersects, obviously, with homelessness, an area of life in America that people don’t like to think about too closely, or not with nuance. Here on the west coast, America’s crisis of homelessness is more visible than perhaps anywhere else in the country. You get the sense, walking around the cities, that there is a sharp divide between the people with homes and the people without, a tacit agreement that one group wants nothing to do with the other, a commitment to ignoring. Homelessness is a much newer idea in the public consciousness than that of the hobo. It wasn’t until the early 1980s that the real boom began in people in the US living on the street, due to welfare cuts, deindustrialisation and the crack-cocaine epidemic. The past few decades’ demonisation of hobos by the media has been part of a generalised demonisation of homeless people.
But the internet has made hobo life visible to more people outside the community. One way that some train riders make money is by documenting their lives on social media. “One of the funny, ironic things about the YouTube personalities that were out there,” Bruce said, “[was that] I thought the response would be all negative, and then I heard from rail workers themselves who were watching these videos and getting more sympathetic towards the train riders. They’re watching, and instead of somebody seeming like some threat in the darkness, they start to see some humanity.”
Right as the sun was setting, a timber train rolled by. We heard it coming first, a rumbling in the distance, and then the clarion call of the bells. Before I got to the west coast, I had difficulty imagining how someone would even think to hop a train. But the train bells that went past us now would have been heard for perhaps a mile around. In this part of the world, the trains quite literally call to you.
Some people end up living this way out of lack of anywhere else to go, or as a way of doing seasonal work. Travelling up to Alaska to do fishing jobs, fighting wildfires on the west coast in the summertime, doing the blueberry harvest in the north-east of the country or cranberries in Washington State. But that isn’t the whole story. “It is very true that there are a lot of people in the world that truly have nowhere to be, and people are fleeing absolute atrocities,” said Allie. But people feel the pull to live this life for different reasons. “For some people, they don’t know why, but they just need to. It’s not really for anyone to judge whether your life has been terrible or great enough to justify you being a hobo or not. People always want to be like, who deserves this life? Everyone who finds it is looking for something, or going somewhere. Or just going.”
The enticement of the open road, or rail, has long been understood as a particularly American feeling. All that promise of freedom in a huge, infinitely explorable country, where a person might be able to begin afresh again and again and again. There is a partial romance to this life. You could feel it around at BBCRC. There was a wooden plank over the communal sink reading “Hobos of the world unite. For we are not related by blood, but by common interest and the pursuit of eternal happiness.” But not knowing whether you’re going to find happiness or anguish is part of the pull. When you’re train riding, said Allie, “you’re in such a place of chaos, so you’re just open to whatever misery or whatever extreme kindness happens to come along. It’s almost like letting go of being able to predict everything.”
It’s a great unexamined question for many people, how to live with the fact that the future is fundamentally uncertain underneath all the trappings of security. Living a life on the rails puts you face to face with that fact, on an hour-by-hour basis, in a way that might be spiritually good for a person. To sit on a train with little to distract you for hundreds of miles but the scenery is to take a journey into oneself, too. “What’s real bad, though, is that then you don’t know how to be still,” as Allie put it.
Railroad riders may not be a significant danger to society. Indeed, they exist in such small numbers these days that they’d hardly be worth worrying about much if they were. But they can be a danger to themselves. This is a hard life. You get freedom, but you pay for it in peril. It is, of course, illegal, although there’s not much incentive for police to arrest rail riders, Bruce told me. The nearest jail to the BBCRC is 50 miles away and overcrowded. Nor is there much in it for railworkers to call in hitchhikers. It means they have to stop the trains, throw off schedules, get home late.
There’s a lot of gatekeeping in the hobo community, Bruce said, a hostility to newbies and outsiders. But that isn’t only about people wanting to keep the culture to themselves. It’s a safety thing. There are forums online that share information about train times, good spots to catch on, security arrangements to avoid and so on. There is one private listserv that you have to be nominated to join, where people post guides to hoboing that aren’t available anywhere else. And for good reason: a beginner coming across this information would be in real danger of getting hurt or killed.
“I would never recommend that somebody just go down to a train track and try to start hopping trains,” one experienced train rider told me. “And if they’re committed to doing it, they should find somebody who already knows how to do it, find a mentor.”
Two of the most popular hobos on YouTube, Hobo Shoestring and Stobe the Hobo, have both died, one by drowning and one out on the rails, leaving their channels suddenly quiet. These are not high-speed machines — Union Pacific trains average around 25mph — yet hobos lose fingers, limbs and lives pretty frequently. Bruce could think of six who had died in the past two years, not from train accidents but from addiction-related incidents. All over the BBCRC there are signs advertising the availability of Narcan, a medication used to reverse opioid overdoses, for visitors who need it, either to use on the spot or to take away with them. “A lot of people that are drawn to trains have issues with drugs, with drinking, with just being socially isolated,” Bruce said, “and they find a community in the rail community, but that’s sometimes not enough.” There is also the danger of your fellow riders. Not everyone is as friendly or in control of themselves as the people I met at the BBCRC.
As much as the hobo refuses to die, his world has changed. Rear units on trains didn’t used to be locked, but now they often are. Railway companies have beefier security, not just to deter train hoppers but because of an increased emphasis on transport security in general in America post-9/11. And there is significant friction within the unhoused world between different types of transient person. In one seminal train-riding documentary, John T Davis’s 1992 film Hobo, a group of train riders discuss their view that in the old days, hobos had more honour because they found it easier to find honest work. Now times are tougher, and it forces people to make money by less honourable means. Train riders don’t tend to like “home bums”, unhoused people who stay in one place, Bruce told me.
This seems to go both ways. “I don’t hang with train bos, I don’t trust them,” said one unhoused person who doesn’t move around, who I met in Eugene, Oregon. “They’re mostly people on the edge of everything.” Then there’s the old-school hobos, who think the punks are rowdy upstarts, versus the punks, who think that lot are tourist-friendly fakes.
The authenticity of the BBCRC is something the people who run it will continue to reckon with. They want people to come, but they don’t want people to come. They put the yellow gate in the road a few years ago because increasing numbers of people who weren’t associated with the community were coming down by car, looking for somewhere to party. “You wanted to see some hobos, so you came to a gated community down a private road?” Martin from Battersea teased me over a beer in the evening.
I slept that night in one of the old boxcars that had a fold-out bed in it for people passing through. When I woke, I went down to Dunsmuir, a nearby town, to see who might be hanging around waiting to catch on that day. The railroad runs right alongside the Sacramento river, and trains often stop here to change crew.
Over the other side of the train tracks from town and down a gravel slope, in a clearing that serves as a hobo jungle, I met a man in a shredded black T-shirt and cut-offs with a star tattoo on his face, listening to Motown on a smashed up old iPhone. Gabriel, 24, has been a train rider since he was 18. He’s from Grants Pass, Oregon, originally, and today he was hitching a ride down to see friends in LA. This suited him as a spot to wait for the train because it was shady, close to a water source and he’d found a Bullfrog-brand citronella candle down here to ward off the mosquitoes.
He laughed a lot, even when he was talking about things that weren’t funny, laughs that often broke into a deep, hacking cough. “Weirdly, the guy who first took me on trains actually died about a year ago, and his name was Bullfrog,” said Gabriel. “It changed the way I travel completely, and now I can go anywhere.” He has visited 40 states so far by riding trains. I asked him if that’s what he liked about train riding, the freedom to explore.
“F**k yeah, and it’s free,” he said, “Can’t beat that.” He rooted around in his big traveller’s backpack for some weed, a grinder and a bong, his beaten-up cap with trinkets attached to its brim such as keys and fishing tackle tinkling as he did so.
A train shunted slowly into view up on the tracks, and we looked at it through the trees as it came to a halt. It’s not the right one, Gabriel said, but he’s in no rush. While he waited, he told me about a place in Shreveport, Louisiana, where you can get a particularly awesome daiquiri, and that he’s distantly related to Edward II.
He hasn’t had much trouble with police or train guards. The people who make his life difficult, he said, are the “tweakers”, or drug users. “For us, people who ride trains, it makes it really hard. A lot of times they’ll trash the city and it gives a stigma towards anyone who’s outside [meaning transient].” Union Pacific has been increasing security in recent times because of the drug addicts. “Broad daylight, no f**ks given, they’ll rob a train,” Gabriel said.
The train up on the tracks still showed no signs of leaving. I had places to be, and so eventually I said goodbye to Gabriel and decided to clamber through the train itself to get back into town. There is guidance about how to do this as safely as it is possible to do an unsafe thing. Three points of contact at all times with the train: two feet and a hand, or the other way around, always. As I climbed, I considered how I would feel if the train began to move and I found myself unexpectedly en route to wherever it was next going to stop. Stupid, reckless, afraid and massively inconvenienced, no doubt. But also somewhat free.
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