>>2321969>for the most part people pick up people who look like the kind of folk they know. Hard luck people pick up hard luck folks. Travelers pick up travelers. When I started flying a sign with just an arrow pointing down the road I got a lot more roadtrippers and and hippies. For what it’s worth they’re more generous with food drugs and company, but hard up people and ministers are the only ones who’ve offered me cash.Train hopping
>find a friendMy first couple catchouts I went with guy who’d been doing it a long time, I’m quite sure I’d have been dead without him. People just go hop trains all the time, but they also get cut in half with some frequency so there’s that.
>it’s fucking loud and cold. We hopped my first train right at sunset in the summer. Three hours later we were a a thousand feet higher and 25 degrees colder, 60mph wind, sitting on metal. Froze the whole night. Even just some cardboard under you is a life saver.
> it’s slowOnce you get up to speed it’s crazy fast, but I’ve hung around all day just to second guess my train and hang around a second day
> the easiest cars to hop are usually the lowest priority. Sure this load of scrap and gravel is going to LA but it’s going to side out every hour for 2 hours the next three days.
>you’ll get arrestedYou just will. Everyone I know who’s done it more than a handful of times has been arrested. The white truck dickhole yard cops are not the "stern warning type". They’ll see you and bust you. Punishments vary, I got a trespass misd so it was just a hefty fine. For the distance I rode and the money I payed (home state, didn’t want a warrant) I could have rented a limo.
The romanticism of train hopping wore off pretty fast for me, it ended up mostly being a stressful hassle. Made a lot of sense when I realized the people I knew who did and liked it best were heroin junkies who could shoot up in one city and come to in another
