When I first heard about the Freight Train Riders of America (FTRA), they seemed to be a boogeyman coalition amongst the train-hopping community. Depicted as a band of late-twentieth-century outlaws, the FTRA reportedly terrorized transient individuals. Homicides, robberies, and even a derailment in 1991 have all been tied to the organization. 

But beyond a brief Wikipedia page, some mentions in news reports, and a handful of law enforcement publications from the late 90s, the FTRA is largely unknown to the public. The accounts out there—for instance, “Train Gangs Today: Another Threat to Law Enforcement” from the U.S. Department of Justice’s journal Law and Order—agree that it started in a Montana bar in 1984. One account in an online forum alleged it began in Libby. A group of Vietnam War veterans facing homelessness in the years following the war came together with a sense of comradery. Under their signature, a black and red patch, they would ride freight trains across the country with a shared sense of security. 

The story took a dramatic turn as FTRA membership grew into the hundreds, and eventually thousands. Other train-hoppers were robbed and, in a few cases, thrown from moving boxcars. The most notorious and well-documented string of crimes were those of Robert Joseph Silveria—“the Boxcar Killer”—who admitted to murdering dozens of other transients. Since 1998, Silveria has been serving double life sentences in Wyoming. While their activity has waned, according to online forums, people ride under the FTRA colors to this day. 

Seeking more information on this group, the presence they have today, and a deeper understanding of the nomadic lifestyle, I reached out to a former train hopper, who asked to remain anonymous.  

According to her account, the greatest stress to transient travelers isn’t this phantom gang from another era. 

The former nomad began riding the rails in 2005 and continued doing so for about a decade. “Those years, I was a teenager and in my early 20s. I traveled alone, with strangers I met in trainyards, and later on with long-term friends.” 

Like many of history’s transients, the nomad said she sustained herself on seasonal work.  

Dr. Mark Feige, professor of American History at Montana State University, described the western frontier as resource extractive. From Montanan mines to Oregonian lumber to the railroads themselves, the movement of materials demanded manual labor. Many poured west with dreams of prosperity sold to them. Instead, they found dangerous, unstable work with daily wages. The boom-and-bust economy led to waves of layoffs, periodically leaving the masses unemployed. The art of freight hopping was adopted out of necessity to travel between jobs, which could run anywhere from seven to sixty days. 

Eventually, the nomad dedicated herself fully to a life in motion, making dues by playing musicbusking—for money. “It was a very calming lifestyle in some ways,” she said, “a life based on the cyclical rhythm of the trains, and on meeting my basic needs for food, safety, and community.” 

That community was discovered with others who, by sentiment or circumstance, found themselves on the fringes of society. “I saw people recognizing a society that had completely f---ed them over.” She described, with fondness, the travelers and self-described “bums” who had her back. “I remember spending the night with a group of sex workers who were sleeping under a bridge in Tacoma, who saw another young lady needing a safe place to rest and invited me in.” 

The nomad described her attraction to the trains as magnetic. But it was also the people and their stories—how they countered the typical “phoniness” of mainstream culture—that solidified her love of life on the move. “There is less and less phoniness the further you get to the fringes,” she said. 

The railroads are no strangers to the fringe. Besides the height of the FTRA, the 90s saw waves of self-described “crusties,” hoboes influenced by punk culture. Mostly working-class teenagers running from abusive and negligent homes, crusties rejected consumerism and embraced life outside typical cultural institutions. 

Even the frontier’s itinerant workers used the railroad as a vehicle for protest. In April of 1894, amidst an unprecedented economic depression, Ohio Politician Jacob S. Coxey called on the masses of the unemployed for a march on Congress to advocate for jobs in public works. In response, an assemblage of miners from Butte stole a train. Chased by federal marshals in a train of their own, they headed east across Montana, with sights set on Washington D.C.  The Butte miners made it as far as Miles City before their arrests. The movement was national, as workers rode boxcars east from all over the country, and a total of fifty trains were stolen in attempts to join the march. Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes describes the spectacle of Coxey’s Army in Hard Traveling: A Portrait of Worklife in the New Northwest. 

According to the nomad, the old FTRA was mostly a relic in her time. And for the years and tracks put behind her, “tens of thousands of rail miles, most nights sleeping under bridges and in train yards,” never once was she bullied by another homeless person or traveler. Most friction she tied back to the same mainstream culture she, and many others, tried to outrun.  

The nomad said, “It supports the ongoing harassment, humiliation, and harm of poor and marginalized people, all those who society deems to be lower value.” 

“I got arrested a lot,” the nomad recounted. “I didn’t get caught any more than anyone else, but they seemed to always want to send me to jail.” Other than the FTRA, the nomad explained that there is very little organization amongst train-hoppers. “Some cops get obsessed with travelersand arrest and catalog everyone thinking they will map out an elaborate gang ring.” 

A place like Montanacan be harsh on those living a nomadic lifestyle, if only for its treacherous winters. Without a place to go, facing the elements can be a matter of life and death for train hoppers. The nomad described one testing journey in December that led to her arrest. She had hopped a train on the Montana Hi-Line alone, bound for Havre.  

She said, “It was –40 [Fahrenheit] before windchill, a record-setting cold front.” Frostbite had already set in. “I pretty much realized I was likely to die if I didn’t get in the engine, and I figured if I had it in me, I would hide when we got to Havre. But when we went to Havre, no part of me was willing to go out in that storm, so I went to jail.” 

Through that experience,and others like it,the nomad gained an intimate look at prejudicial issues plaguing the U.S. justice system. “I was the only white inmate in that jail—it was all native folks and the white guards.” The Council of State Governments Justice Center found that, in 2015, despite making up only 7% of the state’s population, Indigenous American people made up 19% of total arrests in Montana.  

The nomad recalled, “A lady there had been in for a year because she smacked a guy with a beer bottle who was trying to molest her young teenage daughter—he was fine and walked away, but she was still in jail with felony charges.” 

That lady had an old friend from the FTRA. She used her phone call to reach out so that the nomad would have someone to connect with upon release. “I never met her. I was a stubborn teenager, and I just caught another train out of there. But I love that them both were so down to help a stranger out.”  

There is a violent history associated with the FTRA. But membership is extensive and disorganized, and there are little to no accounts from within. Perhaps there are subcultures within the subcultures. While there can and has been volatility amongst train-hoppers, shared experiences may foster a sense of community. Maybe the few who ride under the FTRA today do so as a symbol for that community. 

Monitoring by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found that from 2022 to 2023, the U.S. homeless population increased by 12%. According to the Pew Charitable Trust, Montana had the fourth largest increase in homelessness between 2019 and 2020: 13.9%. Compared to Montana’s homeless population in 2007, the state has seen a 34.3% increase. These are glimpses of a trend that has been accelerating overall since the 1980s. According to Todd DePastino’s Citizen Hobo, this marked a new era of homelessness, with the simultaneous economic recession and federal defunding of social welfare and housing. 

If train hopping has become less common, it’s not because the original causes have disappeared. Affordable housing continues to decline in Montana and the United States. The Montana Department of Labor and Industry found that while the state’s housing costs went up 50% between 2020 and 2022, the average hourly wage only went up 7.3%. More and more people are being forced to the fringes. The greatest threat to the growing homeless population runs much deeper than any train gang. The railroads were built by exploited labor atop stolen land. A pattern of marginalization was bolted into the landscape with each hammered spike of the track. The sentiments and culture of the working class may have seen fluxes, but the wageworker’s experience of the frontier was shaped by industrial expansion, which continues to steam ahead. 

Riding the fringes has acquainted generations of transients with the underbelly of domestic industries. But even amongst the dangers, the prejudice, and the violence, people have found something on the tracks. According to the nomad, “It is a living example that we can thrive without buying into the societal package. Most people who keep riding trains for years find some deep belonging and comfort in it, and for one reason or another, mainstream society isn’t providing that.” 

The nomad, reflecting on the folks she met in the Havre jail, recounts: “They had my back and did everything they could to be supportive and encouraging. They were making a life in a society that is designed to degrade, and them and making it a good life in the ways they could. They were keeping their heads up and their eyes on better days ahead. That’s grit to me—those women summed it up.”