YanceyGreenhorn
Still Not a Moderator
@KrisB figured I’d make a different post since that retirement thread was good and I didn’t wanna....DERAIL it. See what I did there? I describe it as some of the best worst times of my life. Nothing like being in a hobo jungle fighting with 8 other people. Maybe you knew em. Maybe not. Sometimes you were protecting your life, sometimes you were too drunk to remember what the fight was about. I’ve woken up to guys trying to throw me off a moving train. I’ve beaten someone up for trying to throw an older person off a moving train, just to find out the older feller was a more violent A hole than the aggressor lol. You wanna talk about weird politics and unspoken rules and different factions...that world is full of em. I actually still have my highly coveted “crew change guide.” Buncha old riders compiled a book that lists every single spot in the U.S. where a train stops to change one crew for another. Usually an opportune time to get on a stopped train instead of risking falling and getting your legs cut off by a moving one(know 2 people personally that had that happen). The chick I was with (hard to really consider it “dating” in that realm) got off a stopped train in the middle of the night to get water, went to cross another set of tracks and got splattered by an Amtrak coming the other way at top speed. So yeah, it’s sketchy. But anyways , the only way to acquire this “crew change guide” was from a member of the FTRA(Freight Train Riders of America). Like any other fringe group, there was all kinds of weird factions and cliques within this group . Pretty sure there’s a buncha news articles and stuff on YouTube about them. I met a few who were really decent guys. Vietnam vets that just traveled town to town and worked and wanted to be left alone. But by the early 2000s, the whole thing became overwhelmingly violent. Lots of folks on the run, mentally insane people, career criminals...but always violent. And since everyone is constantly bouncing around the country, there’s no way to remain organized. It was THE definition of a show. Eventually it didn’t matter who was considered part of this group or not . Everyone was more or less unhinged. I never claimed membership to that group, as I thought the whole thing was dumb. But nevertheless, you’d either cross paths with some that wanted to fight you because you weren’t part of FTRA, or because they heard thru the grapevine that your were falsely claiming to be part of that group. It was absurd and super juvenile. Just so happened that was overshadowed by violence. It got to the point that if you had a gal traveling with you and you ran into another group of male freight hoppers and they didn’t have a woman with them , it was safer to assume they were gonna try to beat you up or kill you and rape the girl. So no matter what, there’d be a fight initially . Afterwards you might find out that they’re nice people and everyone gets along lol. Point being, I ran into a group of these guys one time and they were doing their usual “I’m gonna ask you questions to see if I think you’re a legitimate hardcore train hopper or not” bull crap. All was good until one guy asked if I was trying to fight him and I said no. So he said I might as well fight him because he was gonna hit me either way. So I hit him first and we fought and I choked him out. He was a much bigger dude than me and when all was said and done he started laughing and thought it was funny that I swung on him first even tho I told him I didn’t wanna fight. Anyway he was one of these FTRA fellers and seemed to know everyone so at some point I had one of these guys give me the 2006 crew change guide. There was a whole bizarre speech and ceremony and they would kill me if I handed it down to someone without permission blah blah blah. So my wife framed it for me and it’s hanging up next to our bed. Every time I look at that thing it’s a reminder to the time I pissed away because I was such a lost human being. Besides drugs and booze, I have a lot of friends who are dead from falling off trains, getting thrown from trains, or some other form of violence that goes with that lifestyle. My one buddy stopped some guys from raping a drunk woman, and the next day the guys found his camp and beat his head in with a cinder block.
So that’s why I’m so insistent on living my quiet little life here. I don’t ever wish I was somewhere else. I don’t like being around loud mouth drunken parties where folks wanna coerce you into wrestling or bare knuckle boxing with them. I did that daily for years. I love the country and could do without being in another city for the rest of my life. Nope, I wouldn’t miss the different cultures or food or sight seeing. If you’ve seen that movie “Into the Wild” with Emil Hersh, I’ve ridden all those routes they show in the film. Everyone thinks that movie is sad but I thought it was nice that he died in his bus in Alaska and not in some gutter along an intermodal freight train route. I’m grateful to be in Burnsville doin my thing here. Now I just need to get this dang Roth IRA squared away to compliment my 401k Here’s the crew change. It was printed out at the library in Eugene, Oregon. Still got all the dirt and train rust on it. Notice how the title and wording doesn’t say anything about trains. A lot of the stuff in it is written in weird abbreviations and codes. That was done in the hopes that if the authorities confiscated it they wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of it. But they did anyway lol.
So that’s why I’m so insistent on living my quiet little life here. I don’t ever wish I was somewhere else. I don’t like being around loud mouth drunken parties where folks wanna coerce you into wrestling or bare knuckle boxing with them. I did that daily for years. I love the country and could do without being in another city for the rest of my life. Nope, I wouldn’t miss the different cultures or food or sight seeing. If you’ve seen that movie “Into the Wild” with Emil Hersh, I’ve ridden all those routes they show in the film. Everyone thinks that movie is sad but I thought it was nice that he died in his bus in Alaska and not in some gutter along an intermodal freight train route. I’m grateful to be in Burnsville doin my thing here. Now I just need to get this dang Roth IRA squared away to compliment my 401k Here’s the crew change. It was printed out at the library in Eugene, Oregon. Still got all the dirt and train rust on it. Notice how the title and wording doesn’t say anything about trains. A lot of the stuff in it is written in weird abbreviations and codes. That was done in the hopes that if the authorities confiscated it they wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of it. But they did anyway lol.