Michael and Johnny, who use GoPros and DSLR cameras to shoot their content, say their footage doesn’t fully convey their IRL experiences. (Michael asked Input to withhold his last name Johnny is an alias.) Like Dancer, both men cover their faces in videos to avoid legal consequences. Michael runs a YouTube channel called Skrypt – which has nearly 4,000 subcribers – with his train-hopping partner, Johnny, also 18 and from Slovakia. Graham often takes camping gear with him on his trips, spending nights in the wilderness and hitting fly-fishing spots during the day. “I feel like I’m in someone else’s movie, in a way, just seeing the scenery going by and riding over these historic paths that millions of people have traveled before me,” he adds. And if you're like me, growing up on the plains, coming across Wyoming when it’s wide open is just gorgeous,” he says. “The Highline through Montana and Glacier National Park, it's just spectacular. Like most train-hoppers, Graham is passionate about the great outdoors and feels his love for nature is what keeps him and others coming back year after year. “That feeling of openness is hard to beat.” But that movement, that being on the move and that constant change, is somehow soothing to me,” he says. Graham, who is a grandfather, splits his time between staying at the Wisconsin home he shares with his wife and taking three-week train-based adventures, which he shares with 13,000 subscribers via his YouTube channel, JumpingOffTheCliff. (Graham does not hide his identity, as he’s not had much trouble with law enforcement - a situation he attributes to white privilege and, these days, his age, which makes him less threatening to police.) “Something inside you says you’ve got to get out of wherever you are and ride for a while.”
Freight hopping tickey serial#
“It’s like being a serial killer or something, y’know? The urge builds up,” says George Graham, a 65-year-old train-hopping vlogger from South Dakota who has been riding the rails since the 1970s. These days, train-hopping can result in misdemeanor trespassing charges, but many aficionados are not deterred by this risk. Over time, hobos became synonymous with people who abandoned traditional society to live their lives on the railroad lines, something that many members of the community did out of necessity, rather than as a pastime or a lifestyle. The term gained popularity in the late 1800s, as interest in these transient communities grew. Through their videos, these hobos - who are overwhelmingly male and white - hope to document what they consider to be a dying artform, while fending off critics who believe their content is dangerous and irresponsible.Īccording to the Secret Society of Internet Hobos, there is little documentation on how hobos - migrant workers who jumped freight trains to travel around America - came to be. Content creators in the space say they are doing their best to honor his legacy. He is part of a community that has been steadily growing since Stobie’s death in 2017.
(Dancer, who covers his face with a mask in his videos to protect himself from legal action, asked Input to withhold his name and age.) They say that I’m going to wind up dead.”ĭancer, a college dropout in his early twenties, has been doing this full-time for the last two years, surviving off money he saved from trading stocks online and the income from his YouTube channel, where he shares his adventures with more than 23,000 subscribers. “People are saying that I’ve got a death wish or think I’m too reckless when I’m on top of the train. But not everyone has been supportive of his efforts.
He lives out of his car between train rides and occasionally crashes on his friends’ couches. by train, cruising through places like Arizona and the Rocky Mountains. Since that first trip, which took Dancer 40 miles north to Fort Collins, he’s traveled all over the U.S. “Those first two seconds kind of got me hooked.”
Freight hopping tickey free#
“Having that free feeling and having the wind hitting you, all your problems go away, because you’ve got to be in the moment and try not to fall off,” he says. “The most supreme feeling ever.” Emboldened, he clambered atop the train to surf it. “It was the best feeling when the train started moving,” says Dancer. After three years of virtual learning, he found the courage to try it on that day in fall 2020. Although Dancer had reached out to people online via hobo forums like Amtrak Unlimited and Squat the Planet, he hadn’t found anyone willing to tutor a newbie, so he studied the train-hopping videos of Stobie and others on YouTube.
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