Between Bakersfield and Fresno, California. Photograph by Rondal Partridge, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, intended to keep the wrong people—cops, journalists, nosy normies like me—from realizing what they’re holding. The Crew Change Guide is a set of best practices and guidelines for hopping freight trains anywhere in the U.S. and Canada. A “crew change” refers to a train’s personnel shift, a brief window of opportunity for those brave enough to take it. In the heist movie, this is that ten-second gap after the night watchman clocks out and before his replacement takes over. For a train hopper, it’s a rare chance to clamber up a wagon undetected.
The Guide is either the train hopper’s Bible or an outdated relic, a must-have or a crutch, depending on whom you ask. The subtitle dubs it “An Alternative Hiking and Camping Guide,” but you won’t find any trail maps inside. Instead, what you see in these unstapled pages are dense walls of highly acronymized text in a miniature nine-point font. “East Joliet YD is becoming a major CN GM YD and c-c point for thru trains,” reads a line headed “Gibson City.” “E. Jackson crosses over S end of YD IM NE of DT.” The acronyms are more shorthand than code, a way of packing as much information as possible into 154 pages. The aesthetic ethos here is lightness, economy, discretion.
The first Crew Change Guide appeared as a partly typed, partly handwritten pamphlet in 1988. The true identity of its author, a reclusive seventy-six-year-old Vietnam veteran known only as Train Doc, is as fiercely protected as the Guide itself. Train Doc disguised his voice for his sole interview, and of the three people I’ve spoken to who claimed to know him, none agreed to go on the record. The most consistent report about him is that he is remarkably litigious—he’s purported to threaten anyone and everyone who uploads the Guide to the internet with copyright infringement.
True or not, the document remains conspicuously absent online. It exists only in the physical, and this scarcity has made the Guide a sacred writ to train-hopping circles across the country. Scans have been known to surface on the darknet now and then, and scammers exploit the unmet demand by selling bogus pdfs of blank pages and blurry photographs. Train Doc, however, insists on keeping the Guide free and “low profile.” “It is not meant to be sold for more than the price of copying,” he writes in the introduction. “Only give copies to riders who will be responsible.”
There are other texts in this misfit family (I’ll call them folk texts, for lack of a better term), though by definition they’re not easily discovered. The Israeli Traveler’s Book is perhaps the most organic and decentralized example. A sort of unofficial Green-Book for Jews, it served to identify safe, unprejudiced restaurants, bars, and hostels in Latin America in an age before Google Reviews. That’s the primary purpose of a folk text: to pass from hand to hand the secret knowledge of the marginalized and the outcast. Many of our ancient scriptures, including parts of the Bible, would once have fit this description. You can’t buy such a book, can’t download it, can’t trace its often multiple authors. But if you run in the right circles, all you have to do is ask.
Kai Carlson-Wee is somewhere near the center of the right circles. I first met him at Hippie Hill in San Francisco almost ten years ago. A poet, Stegner fellow, and Stanford lecturer, Kai started riding freight in his twenties and had just published his first book, Rail, a kind of love letter to the open road. “Part of the fun of reading the CCG,” he told me, “is imagining the riders who scouted the yards, rode the lines, and went through hell and high water to catalog everything … Train Doc spent years riding trains around the country, taking notes, coordinating with other riders to keep things current.” New editions trickle out each year, photocopied in public libraries and private offices around the country to keep up with ever-changing train schedules. On the first page, there’s a caveat—“Some info included is sure to be out of date and innaccurate (sic)”—followed by a warning: “Riding trains can be dangerous.”
***
For the average Joe, train hopping is an all-risk, no-reward activity. There’s the danger of arrest, obviously, but also of serious injury or death. Stories of train track amputations are a common feature of local news stations everywhere. Why toss the dice for the privilege of a slow trip on a jerking, whining, uninsulated slab of steel?
As a kid who grew up reading Jack Kerouac and Jack London and listening to folk music, the answer was obvious. I’d fantasized about riding freight since watching Into the Wild at thirteen. At twenty I got my first chance to try it. I’d moved to New Orleans to write for a local magazine and stumbled onto the city’s transient underbelly by accident. Traveling buskers were everywhere, their hands black with soot and train grease. From my backyard in the Saint Roch neighborhood, I could see packs of young people with banjos spilling out from the Oliver Yard in broad daylight. New Orleans is one of the country’s biggest hubs for illegal train hopping. It’s the vagabond’s answer to the Denver Airport. But it’s not just the visibly grimy or the voluntarily homeless who ride trains. I soon learned that all three of my housemates—working artists buying groceries and paying rent—had at one point each had their own train-hopping experience. I asked my then girlfriend if she’d consider hopping a train with me, but she wasn’t especially interested. She’d done it already.
On a walk by the levee one autumn day in 2015, I passed a crawling freight car and jogged beside it for a while. I reached out and grabbed hold of the steel ladder and tested what it would feel like to pull myself up on the fly. I didn’t know where the train was going or how I’d get off. I didn’t even know what the penalty was for such a trespass (anywhere from three hundred dollars to ninety days in jail). After a hundred yards or so I let go and watched the last of the cars rumble away.
***
It was my girlfriend who first told me about the Guide. That word, guide, seemed to promise so much. I pictured a manual with step-by-step instructions, illustrations, tips and tricks. I sniffed around for it among my housemates, their guests, anyone under forty who rolled their own cigarettes and smelled unwashed.
The etiquette around giving and receiving the Guide is inconsistent, to say the least. For some, it’s a commodity. Among true believers, it’s a rite of passage. Generally, the recipient raises their right hand and swears some kind of oath in which secrecy and discernment are common themes. They promise never to give it to children, cops, strangers, et cetera. To dispose of it by fire whenever possible. Sometimes there are witnesses.
The swearing-in ceremony typifies the central tension of the train-hopping community. The irony of anarchists imposing a structure on the clutter of the information age is apparently lost on the propagators and protectors of the Guide. These are people who preach the porousness of private property while guarding the gates of their church. Trespassing isn’t a sin to them, but copyright infringement is. It’s a symptom of the kind of tribalism that permeates the corners of so many subcultures. To spend any time on the relevant forums and discussion boards is to encounter a familiar brand of gatekeeping, mudslinging, and divisive rhetoric.
“YOU WILL NOT LEARN HOW TO HOP FREIGHT FROM THE FUCKING INTERNET!” reads an average response to a Redditor’s request for advice.
“I think you should find something else to write about,” another user warned me in a private message, claiming he and Train Doc were “connected in some ways.”
Many of these standoffish types identify as something of a victim group, an endangered community insulating itself from the brutality of a capitalist police state. They’re modern-day outlaws, rebels without a cause, and everyone else is either a “housie” or an “oogle”—a square or a tourist.
I was undeniably both when I made the move out to the Pacific Northwest in 2016. I’d done my share of hitchhiking and van-dwelling by then, but my parents were paying off my student loans. I found work as a baker in Eugene, Oregon, and gave a friend $275 each month to rent out an insulated plywood shed in her backyard. I took to walking the train tracks at night, learning the routes and schedules and watching the gutter punks scurry out noiselessly from under a bridge near the rail yard. I even packed a sleeping bag once and spread it out on the bucket of a parked grainer—a train car with a small covered porch. I lay there in the dark for hours before stumbling home at first light. The train hissed and sputtered but never moved an inch.
When I relayed this latest disappointment to a friend, he finally pitied me enough to give me his copy of the Guide. He was a mid-thirties seasonal firefighter with a long blond mullet and a black canvas jacket he rubbed with beeswax to waterproof it. He handed me a bundle of unbound pages. No raising my right hand, no oath, no witnesses. “I think you need it more,” he said, tossing the bundle in my lap.
Kai Carlson-Wee’s initiation looked much the same. It took him about a year to get a copy of a copy from a well-connected friend. “Reading through it for the first time was like gaining access to a sacred text,” he told me. He kept it in a Ziploc bag and taped the pages back together when they ripped. For him, this marked an induction into a new world. He and his brother, Anders (also a train-hopping poet), had been eyeing the Northtown Yard in Minneapolis, a sprawling, seven-mile industrial zone along the Mississippi River, but the scale of the yard had made it unmanageable. The Guide told them about “specific streets, specific jungles, specific holes in specific fences,” he told me. “It helped us tremendously, especially the first few times.”
***
I read on my stomach in bed that night. The train lingo was intimidating, but there were also surprising flashes of accessibility.
“Rolando’s Diner is the only decent greasy cup of coffee left in this town,” reads an entry for Binghamton, New York. Another, for a remote outpost in Quebec, stumbles into philosophical territory. “Does this place really exist? Is it really in Quebec … or Labrador? Can you get there from here? A train-hopper’s existential dilemma.”
The Guide signified more than information to me; it signified the courage to act on it. I knew that no guide, no matter how detailed or digestible, could substitute for experience. But I returned to it again and again over the following days, craving some conclusive invitation. A word, a sentence addressed directly to me. It occurs to me now that maybe riding trains was never what I really wanted, that maybe it was always more about being someone who rode trains, but at the time it felt like an honest calling. I hadn’t considered that those disclaimers at the start of the book (“This guide is not intended to encourage people to hop trains and is for informational purposes only”), those warnings online, the reluctance to give out the Guide—all of this was meant to keep people like me from doing something stupid.
“The Crew Change Guide can save you a lot of frustration,” Kai told me, “but it can’t actually teach you what riding trains is about. If I had waited around for the clouds to part and the train gods to usher me into their secret cult, I would have never started riding trains. Nothing could have reasonably prepared me.”
I stuffed the pages between hardcovers in my bookshelf and planned to revisit them when the time was right. With work and holiday travel and my disintegrating relationship, I had enough on my plate. I found myself avoiding the tracks on my nightly walks, took up motorcycle riding to get my thrills. There was comfort in the thought that I had some forbidden knowledge. That I could use it to disappear at a moment’s notice. I never relinquished my desire to hop a train, I just stopped pursuing it.
These days the Guide’s value is largely nostalgic. A souvenir of a short time—thirty years at best—when the printed word held disparate people together. Train hoppers still exist. Many have migrated to niche forums and message boards to stay connected. Some even thrive as influencers on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, where millions can watch their adventures from home.
Kai suspects that, in the future, the Crew Change Guide will exist as a Google Doc or some kind of open-source document. Though there are still debates about the effects a widely accessible, digitalized Guide will have on the scene, the point is somewhat moot. “The last time I was riding trains,” Kai told me, “everyone was using Google Maps.”