Two Trains Running

The immense neighborhood of the rails, 170,000 miles of track, supports a population no larger than that of a small town; yet this population is widely variegated. Yuppie riders, prosperous souls for whom freight-hopping is a hobby. Eco-activist riders, most of them young, who view riding as a means of using the system against itself. Crusty punks, drunk punks, gutter punks: the order and suborders of the next generation of hobos. Pierced; tattooed; homeless; they travel from squat to squat on the trains. Then there are the hardcore hobos, those who spend their lives moving along the rails. Included in their number are the FTRA, who distinguish between their membership and the general run of hobos by calling themselves “tramps” (or “train tramps”) and “trampettes.”

This attenuated neighborhood and its citizenry constitute a grapevine that stretches coast to coast, conveying information such as how to get the best dumpster pizza in Denver, and where to find water near the Rio Grande yard in Pueblo. It also serves to carry horrific tales concerning the FTRA: a woman raped under a railroad bridge; a man left tied up and sodomized in a freight car, lying in his own blood and feces; two gutter punks and their dogs slaughtered by the gang in a boxcar, their girlfriends raped and then thrown from the train. Such stories are seconded by the majority of media reports. A week-long series on Portland’s KOIN-TV identifies the FTRA as Freight Train Killers, and features an interview with a yuppie rider named K-Line who says she flung herself from a moving train to avoid rape by a group of gang members. A Los Angeles Times article speaks of a “mysterious brotherhood” and states that the gang has “set up rail lines out of Texas as drug-running corridors.” The Spokane Spokesman-Review, under the heading “Killers Ride The Rails,” says that “a racist gang of hobos may be responsible for 300 transient murders…” Internet websites show pictures of hideously damaged corpses and print stories about FTRA atrocities. These and other print and electronic sources, inspired to a great extent by the exploits of hobo serial killer and alleged FTRA member Robert Silveria, paint a picture of a murderous criminal organization that holds barbarous initiation ceremonies involving rape and beating, along with ritual urination. Hardcore felons armed with weighted ax handles called Goon Sticks, who prey upon other transients, create an atmosphere of terror in switchyards and hobo jungles across the nation.

Estimates regarding the size of the FTRA’s membership range from seven or eight hundred to upwards of two thousand—most riders would subscribe to the lower figure. Several police officers have put forward the idea that on occasion FTRA members serve as mules for biker gangs, bringing in heroin from Mexico; but none have gone so far as to say that this is endemic. The crimes with which FTRA hobos are most frequently charged are trespassing, disorderly conduct, and petty thievery, and these incidents are handled by railroad bulls, who usually let the offenders off with a ticket. Local cops don’t spend much time in the rail yards, and, according to one detective, the average hobo’s hygiene is so bad that most officers don’t want them in their patrol cars.

There’s little consensus on any subject among FTRA members themselves, not even concerning the origin of the group. The most believable story has it that a group of 12 hobos, Vietnam vets all, were partying beneath a bridge in Whitefish, Montana (or a bar in Libby, if you’re to credit a variant version) in 1985, watching a freight train roll past. When an X-TRA container came into view, a hobo named Daniel Boone said jokingly, “We oughta call ourselves the FTRA—Fuck The Reagan Administration.” Thus Daniel Boone is acknowledged to be the founder of the gang, an honor he reportedly now considers an embarrassment (he’s given up life on the rails and become an itinerant preacher in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana, living out of a camper van). But Mississippi Bones (aka Marvin Moore, a gang member currently serving a sentence for first degree murder) claims the organization was founded in the 1940s by a black hobo named Coal Train, who died some thirty years later in a lean-to next to an abandoned Texaco station in Desert Center, California. Bones says he “carried the old man some wine” and sat with him a while, and has no doubt that he was the actual founding father.