‘ “We need to have a country all our own,” Rocco decides. “It would be like this, all the time.” ‘ On the rails with the new freedom riders:

We’re heading to Dunsmuir to explore this curiously American phenomenon, which, despite rumors of its death dating back at least a half-century, seems to be catching on again. Men (and until recently, it has been largely men) began riding freight trains after the Civil War, when enough track had been laid to make it worthwhile, and enough dislocated veterans had become averse to staying still. Since then every major war and economic downturn has seen a return to the rails, providing a sort of shadow history of America, a constantly mobile underground of migrant workers, radicals, dreamers and thieves, misfits of all kinds who didn’t mesh with the societal weave. During the depressions of the 1890s and 1930s, it was a common if not entirely acceptable way for working-class men to get around in search of wages. In the ’30s, Frank Czerwanka, one of Studs Terkel’s sources in Hard Times, recalled, “When a train would stop in a small town and the bums got off, the population tripled.”

… The world looks different from a freight train. There’s no heat and no a/c. No meals are served. The restroom is wherever you find it. There are no buttons to push or cords to pull when you want off. The train goes where it wants when it wants to, and sometimes doesn’t go at all. It doesn’t care about your wishes. It doesn’t like or want you, doesn’t even know you’re there. It can kill you without a thought, can leave you behind, maimed and bleeding, without a moment of remorse. There’s no getting around it — it’s ridiculously romantic.LA Weekly

Related: Here is an online gallery by Virginia Lee Hunter, a trainhopping photographer.