Safety Concerns
Hopping a freight train today can be dangerous and even life-threatening. Freight trains are much faster and more secure than in the heyday of hoboing. Freighthoppers may face adverse weather conditions and develop dangerous symptoms such as frostbite and hypothermia. Additional hazards include being jostled off the train, arrested, or attacked by another hobo. According to author and journalist Ted Conover, a large percentage of modern-day hobos are ex-cons, and violence is not uncommon among the transient population.
Read more about this topic: Freighthopping
Famous quotes containing the words safety and/or concerns:
“Perhaps having built a barricade when you’re sixteen provides you with a sort of safety rail. If you’ve once taken part in building one, even inadvertently, doesn’t its usually latent image reappear like a warning signal whenever you’re tempted to join the police, or support any manifestation of Law and Order?”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)
“Science asks no questions about the ontological pedigree or a priori character of a theory, but is content to judge it by its performance; and it is thus that a knowledge of nature, having all the certainty which the senses are competent to inspire, has been attained—a knowledge which maintains a strict neutrality toward all philosophical systems and concerns itself not with the genesis or a priori grounds of ideas.”
—Chauncey Wright (1830–1875)