Brave Dave's Freight Train Hopping Adventures

My first ever freight hopping experience was way back in 2005, in the USA, when I was 23. I was part of an online forum (they were very popular back in the early 2000s) and one of the other members (named Wyatt) posted a story about a time he had ridden some freight trains back when he was younger. I'd not heard of freight hopping before and was very intrigued. I messaged Wyatt and asked him if he'd be up for doing another freight hop, and this time with me in tow. Wyatt knew I'd be good for it and so he said yes. A month or so later I was in the USA, sat on a freight train travelling through New York State.

One funny thing to point out about this adventure is that years earlier Wyatt had gone to prison for 18 months, for drug possession, and so this meant that technically I had flown across the world to meet up with an ex-convict I knew from the Internet, to illegally ride freight trains. It sounds worse than it was. Ahh, the joys of care-free youth, haha.

Six years after my Hobo Living adventure, during which time it had become quite popular (by early YouTube standards, I mean), I had a short video interview with a Sunday Times journalist as he was putting together an interactive feature about hobos and had been given my name by someone else he'd interviewed.

The interview was part of an interactive feature on their website, which was behind a paywall, so I filmed it for others to see. Fun fact: When I'm being interviewed I'm actually just looking at my balcony door pretending it's a person, because the journalist was operating the camera.

For years I'd been considering going back over to North America to ride trains again. Finally, in 2013, I put a plan into action and went and did it. This time I was by myself, and I was in Canada. Due to only ever having freight hopped once, eight years earlier, and being by myself, I didn't cover a huge amount of distance as I was learning through trial and error how to do it again.

When I got home I put this trailer together to let people know that another freight hopping adventure video was coming.

I finally decided that this would be the year that I'd get back out to North America and ride some more trains.

The thing that annoys me about this video is that my GoPro Hero 2 was inside a waterproof case the whole time, meaning that the sound is very quiet and muffled. Also, during the trip I didn't have a Canadian SIM card in my phone, so the only times I had Internet access were when I was in a building with WiFi. This made things a lot more awkward than they had to be at times, for example, not being able to use Google Maps whilst out and about! But hey, it was all practice.

I called my second freight hopping adventure "Canadian Catch Out", and the video ended up doing much better than I was expecting. Bare in mind that when I posted it I had about 2000 subs on YouTube. At the time of posting I think that this video was one of only a handful of freight train videos on YouTube, and by far the longest (the others were mainly just clips). I remember that it was a few weeks after I'd posted the video that it got posted on Reddit and overnight the views and comments spiked like crazy. People were messaging me from all over the world, saying they loved it, and asking me questions.

As I mentioned earlier, I was learning how to freight hop on this trip, and so I really didn't cover much ground. However, riding the trains again, and seeing the response it got from people online got me pumped up for doing another freight adventure in Canada, which would be much bigger and better!

With Canadian Catch Out having been two years ago, I wanted to go out and do it again, but much better. The ideal time for riding freights in Canada is September and I made this video about my plans in July, explaining what I wanted to do, why it would be so good, and how I needed to raise some money. Fifteen minutes of non-stop chat!

Quite predictably I'd left it too late that year to get enough cash to go out in September, but it meant that I then had a year to get things together for a trip in 2016 instead.

It's funny watching this video about what my plans for Canada were in 2015, and comparing it to what I actually did a year later.

A year later and I (almost) made the same mistake as I did in 2015, leaving it far too late to try and raise some money to cover the costs of a freight train adventure.

This video was recorded at the start of September, only weeks before the latest time I could leave for Canada. It looked like I wasn't going to be able to do it for yet another year! However, a mysterious guy (named Lukas) who had really enjoyed my other videos, and was an adventurer himself, contacted me and said he'd pay me the entire airfare needed to get to Canada, because he knew I'd make an awesome video from the trip.

Within days I had bought my plane ticked and was preparing for the trip, this time determined to make it a proper, proper adventure.

So it's thanks to Lukas that Big Fat Freight Hop was able to happen :)

Whilst editing the 11 hours of footage from my amazing adventure that I'd just had in Canada I put together this quick trailer to post on YouTube and let people know that it was on its way. At the time I had about 8000 subs on YouTube and most of them were there for the trains, haha.

Editing these videos was a bit of a nightmare due to how big the video files were and the fact that I had to use the absolutely atrocious Windows Movie Maker to do it. So many crashes during rendering; so, so much swearing from me.

It took me about a month of editing every single day to finally get it finished. I split it into four sections so that video sizes weren't too ridiculous. It was quite good, actually, how the adventure naturally split into four distinct sections anyway, so each one was roughly the same length.

This trip was so much better than my Canadian Catch Out trip from 2013. Due to the popularity of my last video I now had a support network of fans who wanted to help out. The guy I meet up with at the beginning of this video was ace. He picked me up, bought me food, gave me a rail map and then drove me to where I needed to get down onto the tracks. And, most importantly, he gave me a mobile phone with a Canadian SIM installed which meant that I could use it as a hot spot for my phone and have Internet wherever I was. This was SUCH an improvement on the trip. I could use Google maps and talk to people on WhatsApp during most of the trip (there were still vast expanses of Canadian wilderness between cities where signal completely dropped out, but that was okay).

This is a top example of how good it was to have a support network of people. Having found myself on a train going the wrong direction (heading towards the US border and then Detroit of all places!) I was able to ask for advice from a guy I'd chatted to online before the trip, called Jeremy.

It was the weirdest coincidence. Not only was Jeremy able to find out and tell me what my train was likely to do and where it might slow down a bit (enough for me to try and jump off), but he also happened to live not very far from the random crossing I ended up at, and sent me a taxi and then let me stay over at his place! Canada is 4700 miles wide, and I just happened to bail off a train in the middle of nowhere which was within a 30 minute drive to the apartment of the guy who'd been helping me out on WhatsApp. What are the chances?!

Toronto was a right ball ache to get out of though. So many train tracks going in so many directions.

From Winnipeg I get back onto the rails and make my way towards Calgary, running into a little bit of trouble in a yard somewhere near Regina.

The final chapter of my adventure! After hanging out with an old friend in Calgary I finally get to the Rockies where the gods smile down upon me with glorious blue skies and blazing sunshine. Awesome!

Big Fat Freight Hop proved to be very popular! Again it was about a month before YouTube's algorithm got hold of it, but then my videos started being recommended to people all over the place, and lots of them posted my vids on forums and social media. The views and comments rocketed up. I got over 90,000 subs from these videos alone, and it was about six months when the first video hit a million views!

Due to its popularity I had been meaning to do a QnA video, to address all of the questions that people were asking in the comments, so I made this video to tell people. Funnily enough I never actually got round to making the QnA video, haha.

Due to how many people were watching my videos and demanding that I make more I wanted to find out if any of them would be willing to help fund another adventure. Someone suggested a new website called Patreon (heard of it? haha), so this video is inquiring about support for that.

I had yet another freight hop adventure in mind, and this time I was going to meet up with Jeremy from Big Fat Freight Hop and we would ride east from Toronto, covering all of the track I hadn't yet done. This video is to let people know that things are in motion but that I was still short of funds.

Wanna hear a story? This is me, sat in my car, talking non-stop for 12 minutes about what just happened to me in Canada. Suffice to say, things did not go well, and my freight hopping days have officially come to an end. You can thank a disgruntled rail yard security guy in Saskatchewan for that, haha.

No but seriously, I was absolutely gutted when I got home after this trip. It was such a surreal feeling, having left my house and then getting back to my house less than 48 hours later, but with having been to London then Canada then London and back home during that time. Crazy! I was properly feeling down for at least two weeks after this trip, having been so hyped about doing another, and having all these cool things planned, and a big audience waiting to see it! And then... DENIED!

Well, at least it makes for a cool story, so it's not all bad.

On a side note, I find it hilarious that over a million people have watched this video of me just talking in a car.