Originally Posted by MisterV View Post
A couple train tales.

When I was a kid we'd go down to the railroad tracks and use the awl feature on our Scouting knife to pick the railroad locks that guarded the track switches; we never changed the switch setting as we weren't intent on killing anyone, we just wanted to display the purloined locks in our school locker.

A few years after we divorced, my first wife took up with a hard-scrabble hobo from some Indian rez; they would disappear from town for extended periods of time, riding the rails.

Through them I learned of FTRA.

I recall one discussion where he admitted to killing another man, a hobo: I don't recall why or where he killed him but I got the impression that it wouldn't take much provocation to get killed.
Half the folks at the hobo convention reminded me of the bikers who attend Biker Weeks. They really aren't 1970's type bikers. They're suburbanites with a lot of cash to burn, who enjoy adventuring illegally on rails two or three weeks out of the year and treat it like a vacation. They knew their stuff, however. What lines go where, the train times, the best places to grab a ride. It's an entire recreational subculture.