Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
The NY Times has the story:
For nearly as long as rail lines have crisscrossed the country, there have been stories about wanderers covertly climbing aboard train cars and riding away from problems or speeding toward some glimmering promise on the horizon.
The paths of train hoppers, tramps, hobos and travelers, looking for work, adventure or merely free transportation, have been recorded in lyrics and in literature. Jack Kerouac, Jack London and John Steinbeck have written about them. They have populated the songs of Merle Haggard and Woody Guthrie.
More recently, filmmakers have documented the experience of riding the rails across the country’s varied terrain. And some of those works were recently screened in a storefront community center in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, as part of a traveling cinematic exhibition called the Hobo Film Festival, which is progressing from state to state by way of a $200 Toyota station wagon driven by a 31-year-old train hopper from Asheville, N.C., named Shawn Lukitsch.
On Wednesday night, Mr. Lukitsch stood on Tompkins Avenue outside the center, the 123 Community Space, where the films were to be shown. Tattoos of train tracks circled his right wrist, and he puffed on a small pipe as he described the appeal of viewing the landscape from inside an empty boxcar.
“It is pure, unadulterated, unhomogenized America,” he said. “You see everything from the seediest underbelly of industrial areas to rural places to people’s backyards with laundry hanging on a line.”
Mr. Lukitsch said that he began riding trains 14 years ago, while living in Milwaukee, and that he had logged about 120,000 miles through the 48 contiguous states as well as parts of Canada and Mexico. He has ridden on rail lines belonging to companies like Union Pacific, Southern Pacific, Norfolk Southern and Burlington Northern.
