Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression

by Errol Lincoln Uys, Linco Uys Errol

During the Great Depression, more than 250,000 teenagers left their homes and hopped freight trains crisscrossing the United States. They were looking for work and adventure; some wanted to leave their homes, and some had to. They grew up in speeding boxcars, living in hobo jungles, begging on the streets, and running from the police and club-wielding railroad guards.

The restless youth of these boxcar boys and girls, many who went from 'middle-class gentility to dirt poor' overnight, is recaptured in Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression. Whether as runaways or with blessings of parents, these boys and girls hit the road and went in search of a better life.

Illustrated with rare archival photos and drawing primarily on letters and oral histories of three thousand men and women who hopped freight trains, Riding the Rails brings to life a neglected saga of America in the 1930s. Self-reliance, compassion, frugality, and a love of freedom and country are at the heart of the lessons these teens learned. At journey's end, the resilience of these survivors is a testament of the indomitable strength of the human spirit.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Trains, Poverty, Travel, Railways

302 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1999

About the author

I was ten when I penned my first novella, 'Revenge,' on the back of stock certificates tossed out by my mother. My journey to a writing career was anything but conventional. I sold teddy bears on the streets of Johannesburg, worked at a dolls’ hospital, ran a missing persons’ bureau, made cane furniture, and spent two years as a law clerk – all before the age of 21.

When I joined the Johannesburg ‘Star,’ my first published article was an op-ed piece, ‘Happiness is an Unprejudiced Mind.’ My newspaper and magazine career spanned three continents. Along the road, I was editor-in-chief of Reader’s Digest’s South African edition.

A move to the Digest’s U.S. headquarters led to a two-year assignment with James A. Michener on his South African novel, 'The Covenant.' Commenting on our work together, Michener said: “Uys showed such a mastery and predilection for plotting that again and again he came up with dazzling ideas that again and again attracted my attention, often proposing something so far from my intention that I was bedazzled.”

I devoted five years to the writing of 'Brazil.' I spent a year on my research traveling extensively in Brazil, where I journeyed 15,000 miles, almost exclusively by bus. My original manuscript penned by hand reached a staggering 750,000 words.

My non-fiction book, ‘Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression’ tells the story of a quarter million boxcar boys and girls roaming America in the 1930s.

Now a United States citizen, I live in Boston, Massachusetts, with my wife, Janette, whom I met in a Johannesburg park, when I was six years old and not quite ready to begin selling teddy bears!

Reviews

[Ken Dowell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book for a buck at a second hand bookstore. It was stamped “discarded” by the Brown County Library in Nashville, Ind. I don’t know what the folks at the Brown County Library are thinking about because this is a really good book.

Riding the Rails is the story of American teenagers during the Depression, some 250,000 of them. With no prospect of work, no perceived reason to stay in school and a desperately shrinking home environment, they hit the road. Or, to be more precise, the railroad. They jumped on, stowed away in and rode atop freight trains, travelling the country looking for fruit to pick, lumber to chop and grain to harvest. And maybe for a little adventure along the way.

WGBH/PBS produced a documentary called “Riding the Rails” in 1998 as part of the “American Experience series. In researching that film, the producers solicited letters from survivors of the experience. They heard from about 3,000 of them. It was the content of those letters that was used to produce both the Peabody Award winning film and the book. So, oddly, this is a book that was based on a TV show. It was published by TV Books, a publisher whose goal was to do just that. They’ve since folded.

Those who survived a hobo adolescence in the 30’s remember it as a moving, life-changing experience. But at the time not a happy one. Hopping on and off trains is dangerous. Some lost their lives and some lost their limbs. These guys and girls were hungry, tired, broke and scared. Mostly hungry. As one of them noted: “One of the sad things about kids on the road was that they didn’t know how to play. Life was earnest, life was hard.”

Here are a few of the people I was introduced to in Riding the Rails.
 Arvel Pearson lived behind a railroad station in an Ozark village. By the age of nine he was working in a strip mine. When the Depression hit, the mines closed. Arvel was on the road at age 15 and stayed there from 1930 to 1942 picking up a few days work here and there as a migrant farm worker in the summer and a coal miner in the winter. In 1939 the National Hobo Convention named him “King of the Hoboes.”
 Clarence Lee was one of six children in a Baton Rouge, La., family that was forced through hard times to go into sharecropping. Clarence was sent out by his father who told him he could no longer support him. As a black teenager he had to confront racism as well as hunger, cold and danger. By working on a dairy farm for 10 cents an hour he was eventually able to buy his parents out of sharecropping. The film shows Clarence in his eighties still working as a groundskeeper at a school in California.
 Unlike most of the kids who rode the rails, John Fawcett left a comfortable home in West Virginia looking for adventure. “I didn’t see suffering until I ran away from home. It would be a cold and unfeeling person who wouldn’t be stunned and angered at the squalor of the streets and migrant camps.” He devoted much of the rest of his life to fighting for human rights. A member of the ACLU he was active in the antiwar, women’s rights and gay rights movements.

The movie includes interviews with many of these survivors. It also has 1930’s newsreel footage with some of the adolescent transients. The black and white images of the railroads, the Chicago Worlds Fair and a “hobo jungle” are accompanied by a score of blues and folk music of the era, including Woody Guthrie and Brownie McGhee. There’s also some original songs by “Guitar Whitey” who himself was riding the rails in the 30’s.

The book has a lot more detail than you can get into a one hour+ documentary. My only issue with the book is that it is imperfectly edited, with a couple instances of a missing word or broken off sentence. But it is so interesting. Reading it made me wonder why when history is taught in our schools they don’t teach high school kids the history of people their age. Surely it would be more compelling and more meaningful for them.

Riding the Rails is now more than 15 years old. You’re not going to find it on the front tables at the Barnes & Noble. The publisher is out of business but there are still quite a few copies available on Amazon both new and used. Or maybe your librarians had a little more appreciation for this story than the ones in Brown County, Indiana. The documentary is available on YouTube and through PBS.

[Julie Yates · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories of a tiny fraction of the over 250,000 boxcar teenagers – many as young as 13 and few quoted who were younger than 10 – in first hand accounts. Sources are the thousands of letters sent in response to a questionnaire in an AARP magazine in 1993, with in depth follow up questionaries sent to 1,500 individuals. Much of the book is reminiscing of older people (in their 70s) about their youth, so it is a bit whitewashed (lots of “it was worth it” and “I learned more on the road then ever would have at school”) but still worth reading.

Not long ago, a former boxcar boy was telling a young man about his trials and the depression: how he went without food for a day and a half; how he unloaded a truck hold of threshed wheat and was given a rotten ham sandwich; how he was thrown off a train in the Nevada desert. The young man told [him] that it couldn't be true, something like that could never happen in this country. As the century itself passes and the years of the boxcar boys and girls draw to a close, these memories of a landscape of ruin stand as a reminder to those who might forget the lessons of history.


A great many were saved from permanent vagrancy by being drafted in WW2.

"One of the sad things about kinds on the road was that they didn't know how to play. Life was earnest, life was hard. We didn't have time from ball games or anything like that. When we got off the road, we had to go to war ... We went from childhood to being adults. We never thought about being teenagers. All we though about was surviving."

[Jeff Mauch · Rating 5 out of 5]

During the Great Depression everyone suffered. Pictures come to mind of dust bowl farmers, men in bread lines, Hoovervilles, families piling everything they own into a car and heading towards a hope and a prayer. I think sometimes we forget about how the children were affected in these times because we focus on the adults so much, but they suffered too and many times went out on their own to lessen the burden on their families and tried to find their own way. This book is the account of hundreds of these people that rode the rails all over the United States in seek of food, jobs, and sometimes even just to see the country. I always had an image of a hobo being an older gentleman loner trying to just beg his way from place to place as means of survival, but I never put together the Great Depression and children into my image. The fact is a significant portion of those riding trains around the country during this time were kids, and families. This book is an eye opening accounts as told by many of the people in interviews 50-60 years later. I think it's jarring because of the sheer volume and depths of those that participated and told their tales for this book and documentary. From injuries and begging for food to running from detectives and following the harvests for work, this is a tales not covered in any of the history classes or books that I've been a part of in any way, shape or form. It's at times both incredibly moving and depressing and at others borderline nostalgic and incredible. This is a solid, mostly untold story that needs to me talked about more.

[Geoff Mcdowell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brilliant book and an amazing reflection of hope, spirit, determination and adventure!

[Adelaide Mcginnity · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though a competent oral history of young hobos of the depression era, Riding the Rails is held back from greatness by a lack of organization that leads both to confusing shifts in topic within chapters and to a feeling of repetitiveness as similar anecdotes and themes keep re-appearing again and again and again as the reader progresses through the book. Like Studs Turkel's Hard Times, from which Riding the Rails draws obvious inspiration, the book is at its best when seeing the world through the lens of a single eyewitness, but unlike Hard Times, where the interviews form the backbone and the anecdotes are just there to provide context, Uys's long-form interviews seem jarringly out of place, as attempts to provide color to the otherwise repetitive narrative laid out by the strings of anecdotes.

It is too bad that this book is organizationally such a mess, because the topic is a fascinating one and the individual anecdotes themselves are often touching, humorous, or both. I also respect this book because I feel it provides a very valuable service to humanity. In the 1990s, there were still a plethora of boxcar boys and girls alive who were able to tell their story. Today, almost all are dead.

[Faith Enck · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic historical narrative paying homage to the young men and women of the Great Depression who chased adventure as much as they chased survival, finding the gumption to make something of themselves and have since shaped America as we know it. The desperate era of the 1930’s is no longer just the starving dust bowl we learned of in school. It’s an era filled with deep compassion, selflessness, and love for your fellow man.

[Debbie Turner · Rating 4 out of 5]

An eye-opener, for sure. This book covers the story of the 250,000 plus teenagers and young adults who dealt with the fall of the stock market, the lack of jobs, and the lack of any hope for their future in 1929 and the years following by hopping on freight trains, traveling around the country in search of jobs. The stories are varied and interesting. I remember hoboes coming to our door when I was a small child. My Mom would make them a sandwich. One time, my sister and I climbed our fence and visited the hobo camp not far from our home. This book provided many missing pieces to the puzzle for me. Very interesting. I would like to find the documentary that was based on this book.

[Len Knighton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think a lot of kids growing up in the 1950’s and ‘60’s like I did fantasized about being a hobo. There seemed to be something romantic about carrying all your possessions in a bundle hanging on a stick, riding trains across the country.
This book shows that side of the life that thousands of men and children had during the Depression years. But for the most part, it was a hard and dangerous life.
When I bought this book, I thought it would be a short book. I think the book is a bit too long, too repetitive. Every story was unique but also had similar elements. The redundancy brought my rating down at least one star.

Three stars waning.

[Luke · Rating 2 out of 5]

Less interesting than it sounds. Riddled with statistics. More of a resource book than an intriguing read.

[David Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression by Errol Lincoln Uys (Routledge 2003) (305.568) (3830).

This is a great book about how a mass of teenaged and twenty-something Americans created the subculture of railroad hoboes to survive during the days of abject poverty while America was in the throes of the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s.

This was a desperate time for many Americans. There was a vast army of hoboes and tramps traveling around the US in search of work, many of whom were kids or teenagers. Some of these kids were simply youthful adventurers who lit out by rail to see the world. However, many more of these kids had simply left home and hearth (often a small family farm) because their parents could no longer afford to feed them.

Notwithstanding Woody Guthrie’s song “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” which is a paean to the freedom of life on the road, author Errol Lincoln Uys makes clear that these hoboes did not have an easy life. Hoboing is at heart a matter of availing oneself (e.g. stealing) of free rides on the railroad, and it drove the railroads crazy. The life of a hobo was dirty and exceedingly dangerous. Hoboes were often hungry, filthy, broke, exhausted, desperate, and far from home.

Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression is a snapshot of survival against overwhelming odds. Each chapter begins with introductory commentary which is followed by the personal stories of a hobo or two for illustration.

Many of the young Americans of this generation never had a chance to experience childhood in the manner which most Americans would generally consider customary. It appears that kids had to grow up fast in those not-so-good-old-days.

My rating: 7/10, finished 7/14/23 (3830).

[Peter Pactor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extraordinarily good book about the life of teenagers on the road looking for work during the Great Depression. I thought the book brought out every emotion in the reader. It shares why teens hit the road, how families couldn't afford to keep them, how families suffered when the father lost his job and lost his pride. There was indeed adventure riding the rails, but there was often hunger, thirst, little comradeship, danger and fear. The kids couldn't always trust the authorities. And yet as they traveled many people were generous and shared with them what little they had.

This book has been based on first-hand accounts of people who road the rails during the depression, why they did so, and how and why they left.

Everyone should read this book.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Goodreads Giveaway Review:

Great historical read about a unique group of people in the Dpression Era. We have all heard of hobos riding trains and movies and TV show them in a comical light usually, but this book uses facts intermixed with first hand accounts to give us the turth about these riders and the times they lived in. It is a real eye opener to the conditions of our country and the resilience of our people between the Stockmarket Crash and WWII to those of us who have only learned bits and pieces in our high school History classes.

[Lola Ann Perkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book for now, especially, but set in 30s America, "lest we forget"

I'm from a railroader family, back generations, but none of them ever reported on the teenagers some of them must have met during the Great Depression. These long-ago young people recount their experiences in vivid and sometimes
disturbing detail in this proud, sad, heartening, and revealing narrative. Hope for our future, in this year 2019.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to read this book because this is what my husband's late father did. He became an orphan when both his parents died of tuberculosis. He ran away from the orphanage at 14 and rode the rails until the CCC picked him up. I heard he said that saved his life. He was working in a gas station when he heard about Pearl Harbor. The next day he joined the Marines. He could have been a chapter in this book, except that he never talked about those years.

[Phillip E Maynard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and entertaining

I enjoyed this book very much. The personal stories and memories of riding the rails keeps you interested throughout. This is yet another look at the Great Depression that will certainly open your eyes wide to the struggles and devistation that is caused.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this book should be read in schools. It’s not just a book about history during the depression. It shows the hardships of that time where even kids as young as 13 knew and wanted to work to help support the family. Either that or the teenagers felt like they were bringing their parents down. I won this on Goodreads firstreads.

[Henry · Rating 5 out of 5]

- During the Great Depression, many young boys went into the railroad humping often due to the dire economic circumstances. In rare circumstances, boys do that due to boredom and the fascination of the idealized world of railroad humping

[Lauri · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book for awhile and then got bored with the repetition and dryness of the narration. Could have been a much more interesting read.

[Beth · Rating 2 out of 5]

The topic and stories were interesting, but this book got repetitive and I quit halfway through. The lack of photos in my Kindle edition was disappointing.

[Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

For decathlon 2019

[Mark Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent account of how people lived during the Depression

[Kimberly Raden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Real people, real stories. Eye opening.

[Kerry Chaput · Rating 5 out of 5]

Informative and full of heart!

[Julie Cherry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best books I have ever read.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent collection of true accounts of young hobos during the Depression of the 30's catching trains and hoping to get work. Some were out for adventure but most were desperate.

[Anastascia · Rating 5 out of 5]

amazing book

Learned so much I never knew. This book was a suggestion when I watched Tasting History with Max Miller. Great history read.

[John Volker · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Riding the Rails" is a fascinating and well-researched book that explores the experiences of young men and women who rode the trains during the Great Depression. The author provides a unique and compelling look at a little-known chapter in American history through interviews and historical research.

The book is organized into chapters that focus on different aspects of life on the rails, including the challenges of living as a hobo, the camaraderie and sense of community among the riders, and the dangers they faced as they traveled from place to place. The author also provides a broader context for these experiences, exploring the more significant economic and social factors that led to the Great Depression and the mass migration of people searching for work.

The writing in "Riding the Rails" is clear and engaging, and the author does an excellent job of bringing the story to life. The interviews with former hobos are fascinating, and the reader will be captivated by the personal stories of resilience and determination that these individuals have to share. The historical context is well-researched, and the author provides a nuanced and insightful look at a time in American history that is often overlooked.

In conclusion, "Riding the Rails" is a must-read for anyone interested in the Great Depression or the history of America's railroad system. The book is well-written, the research is thorough, and the subject matter is exciting and vital. It is highly recommended.

[William Matthies · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 1930's is probably best known for the world-wide depression. A byproduct of that in the US was the mass exodus from home of millions who moved from one place to another all hoping to find a better life. And not just adults, kids too, many as young as 8, on their own or traveling with others no older.

This book describes that era and those kids. Mostly a collection of stories of those who rode boxcars from one end of the country and back. What you learn of them would be hard to believe were it not so well documented. But while you know they rode you probably don't know what that was like. Read this book and you will know.

I initially rated it three stars because the personal accounts became repetitious and were seemingly random. But after thinking about it more I've increased the rating to four stars because that is indicative of what that time was like. The rail riders often didn't have a destination in mind; if a train was leaving, and they didn't like where they were, they'd climb aboard and go where it was going, hoping for something better.

If there is any good to have come from the period 1929, when the depression began, and the end in 1941, it would have to be how it toughened what was to become known as The Greatest Generation for their next big challenge, WWII.

[Mathias · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book i have read is "riding the rails," by Errol Lincoln Uys, this was a tough read for me because i am a mystery or adventure kind of guy, but this is a great book if you would want to learn about the history of kids in America back during the great depression.
During the Great Depression, There were many teenagers that rode on trains to different towns or cities looking for work. These teens left their homes because they felt their families didn't want them or some ran away because they felt ashamed of parents without any jobs. They thought they could find a better life. These teens didn't understand that they were stepping into a world of danger and not all excitement. Some of the teens stuck together, so they could survive and care for one another. This book lives on through their past.
This book provides pictures in the very middle to show how life was tough, where they would live, and what these people looked like. This story has showed me the dangers that are just out our front door, and Some ways we might be able to prevent ourselves from getting hurt.
This book was hard for me because i am not the best reader but if you want to know about the teens during the great depression, this is the book for you "Riding the Rails."

[Ryan R]

Ryan Reilly March 23
mp2 book review Riding the Rails


The book Riding the Rails was not one of my favorites. This was a difficult read, there are many long words that i did not understand. There really wasn’t a plot, it was more of a informational read. Which i do not enjoy. The writing style of the author, Errol Lincoln Uys was hard to comprehend. The book jumped around from fact to story to characters. Also most characters were only mentioned once or twice, i wouldn’t even refer to them as characters. This is most definitely a higher level novel that i shouldn’t have chosen. Although i didn’t care for this book i did take away something from it. I think this book teaches a wonderful lesson on how children and teenagers these days are very ungrateful. We need to be lucky for what we have. Still, i would not recommend this book to someone my age, or any one that enjoys reading exciting, senseful or horror, I might mention it to a adult who enjoys learning about the past.