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:
“The Declaration [of Independence] was not a protest against government, but against the excess of government. It prescribed the proper role of government, to secure the rights of individuals and to effect their safety and happiness. In modern society, no individual can do this alone. So government is not a necessary evil but a necessary good.”
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“A man sees only what concerns him.... How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)