Hobo The Rail Rider

About the Author The Author Bubba is from Evansville, Indiana. He joined the Navy at the age of eighteen and served in the United States Navy for 27 years and also worked for the Defense Department for 20 years. He is a family man and married Margaret Moore of Belfast, Ireland and was married for 55 years until she passed February 2018. They have two children Tom and Heather and one granddaughter Haven. Recently married Janice Bickford of Danville, Virginia. The Author is a church member. Loves to spend time with the family and play golf.

Through letters and photographs, profiles teenagers who hopped the freight trains during the Great Depression in order to find adventure, seek employment, or escape poverty.

This unique children's book offers firsthand insight into the mystique and culture of the hobo community which dates back to the end of the Civil War. It was co-authored by the Dutchman, a Hobo King, and Gypsy Moon, a Hobo Queen. The story of BoBear is loosely based on the life and experiences of the Dutchman, a working hobo who has spent his life on the road.Young readers will be captivated by this compelling story as told by the Dutchman (Dutch VanDammer) and gain useful information from his lessons as an urban survivalist. Gypsy Moon (Jacqueline Schmidt) is a career writer, seasoned rail rider, oral historian and author of other books on this same topic.

Drawn from intimate interviews with 14 modern-day "steel rail nomads," One More Train to Ride provides a revealing picture of today's American hobo. Interspersed with their stories are original poems and songs echoing the ancient lyricism and loneliness of life on the road. Their connections with the past make the experiences of these hoboes even more striking, as they ride freight trains and jungle up in hobo camps, light years away from the 21st-century cyberworld -- yet touching the very core of American freedom and individualism. Cliff Williams skillfully elicits details of family background, motives, and clear insights into the daily life and philosophy of the modern hobo. With its evocative link to the past, One More Train to Ride continues a long tradition of books on hobo oral history, including Nels Anderson's The Hobo (1923) and Thomas Minehan's Boy and Girl Tramps of America (1934).

Hopping a freight in the St. Louis rail yards, Ted Conover0́4winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award0́4embarks on his dream trip, traveling the rails with "the knights of the road." Equipped with rummage store clothing, a bedroll, and his notebooks, Conover immerses himself in the peculiar culture of the hobo, where handshakes and intoductions are foreign, but where everyone knows where the Sally (Salvation Army) and the Willy (Goodwill) are. Along the way he encounters unexpected charity (a former cop goes out of his way to offer Conover a dollar) and indignities (what do you do when there are no public bathrooms?) and learns how to survive on the road.But above all, Conover gets to know the men and women who, for one reason or another, live this life. There's Lonny, who accepts that there are some towns he can't enter before dark because he's black, and Pistol Pete, a cowboy who claims his son is a doctor and his daughter a ballerina, and Sheba Sheila Sheils, who's built herself a house out of old tires. By turns resourceful and desperate, generous and mistrusting, independent and communal, philosophical and profoundly cynical, the tramps Conover meets show him a segment of humanity outside society, neither wholly romantic nor wholly tragic, and very much like the rest of us.

Nothing better represented the early spirit of American expansion than the railroad. Dominant in daily life as well as in the popular imagination, the railroad appealed strongly to creative writers. For many years, fiction of railroad life and travel was plentiful and varied. As the nineteenth century receded, the railroad's allure faded, as did railroad fiction. Today, it is hard to sense what the railroad once meant to Americans. The fiction of the railroad—often by railroaders themselves—recaptures that sense, and provides valuable insights on American cultural history. This extensively annotated bibliography lists and discusses in 956 entries novels and short stories from the 1840s to the present in which the railroad is important. Each entry includes plot and character description to help the reader make an informed decision on the source's merit. A detailed introduction discusses the history of railroad fiction and highlights common themes such as strikes, hoboes, and the roles of women and African-Americans. Such writers of “pure” railroad fiction as Harry Bedwell, Frank Packard, and Cy Warman are well represented, along with such literary artists as Mark Twain, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O’Connor, and Ellen Glasgow. Work by minority writers, including Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, Frank Chin, and Toni Morrison, also receives close attention. An appendix organizes entries by decade of publication, and the work is indexed by subject and title.

Zeke Wappinger, a precocious, bright and adventurous almost seven-year-old boy, gets fed up with his workaholic and technology-obsessed parents and decides to hop a freight train in the middle of the night from his small hometown in New Mexico. He is immediately befriended by two hobos and goes on a life-changing journey. More life-changing, however, is the effect it has on his parents, his two adult hobo companions and the various people who get sucked into the vortex of his adventure. The Six-Year-Old Hobo is a story of relationships, redemption and fate and will appeal to readers of all ages.

50 chilling true stories of haunted trains and ghostly workers from the steam locomotive era to the modern day Discover dozens of hauntings on railroads in 19 US states as well as in Canada and the UK, including the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, Atlantic Coast Line, Nickel Plate Road, Pennsylvania Railroad, and many more. Haunted Rails tells the tale of a possessed caboose on the Louisville and Nashville Railroad and a Civil War–era rebel ghost train; museum hauntings at the Georgia State Railroad Museum in Savannah and the Railroaders Memorial Museum in Altoona, Pennsylvania; apparitions at Vancouver's Canadian Pacific Waterfront Station and Nashville's Union Station; and the haunted presidential trains of Abraham Lincoln and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Filled with ghost trains, spectral switchmen, and frightening facts, Haunted Rails is a spine-tingling ride to the other side that you don't want to miss. All aboard!