BitoTS

USA photo collection part 1: New York and Pennsylvania

Added 2026-01-08 18:44:39 +0000 UTC

It's hard for me to describe what I felt on the first day in New York City. I was severely jet-lagged, about to throw myself into one of the biggest adventures of my life. There was no concrete plan. Just try to hop from New York to California within two weeks and see what happens. Two of the three people I was going with I had never met before in my life, and one of them literally had never been on a freight in his entire life. That's Erik.

I met him on the first evening in New York. We were both very tired and jet-lagged, therefore our first priority was to look for a spot to sleep. A friend tipped us off to a spot in Central Park, which turned out to be perfect. After 12 hours of sleep, we woke up with a view of the skyline and started heading into the city to explore.

In the evening we met two local urban explorers who agreed to join us on the hop to Chicago the next day. The train would leave every morning at around 7am from a terminal in Jersey City, giving us 12 more hours to explore the city before heading to the yard. We surfed the metro multiple times and hit up a tall construction site in Jersey City, before making it to the yard at 7 in the morning with zero hours of sleep.

Unfortunately we had missed the Chicago-bound intermodal that morning, so we had no other choice but to wait 24 hours for the same train one day later. I spent the time observing the yard, and taking in the atmosphere. It was a nice place to wait.

After a beautiful sunset and sunrise, the train showed up as expected at around 7 in the morning. The four of us managed to hop on the train unseen, and set off on the 28 hour journey to Chicago.

The first couple hours of riding went smoothly. We headed east, cruising through some hills and woods and soon crossed the border to Pennsylvania. It was to be predicted however, that the hop wouldn't go so smoothly forever. None of us had much experience hopping in the US, if any at all, and our inexperience and carelessness led to us getting spotted multiple times. At the first crew change spot in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania we got kicked off the train by an angry guy. Hiding in some bushes a few hundred feet from the train, we spotted a rail cop slowly driving around the yard, looking for us. Despite this, we decided to wait it out and managed to board the same train as it left the yard 20 minutes later. We were pretty sure no one had seen us do that, and settled down as the train curved through the Appalachian mountains for the next few hours.

Everything seemed fine, until the train stopped in Altoona, Pennsylvania and a car started driving up and down the train, checking the wagons. The four of us were split between two rides, with me and one of the urbex guys from NYC having a particularly bad one. We got spotted by the car, and a surprisingly friendly Norfolk Southern employee kicked the two of us off the train, just letting us go and leaving Erik and the other guy on the train unseen. Somehow, we managed to walk around the yard and board the train from the other side just as it started leaving again. The only ride we could get was a suicide, with us being crammed right above the wheels. Luckily the train stopped again only 20 minutes later, inside the horseshoe curve. The four of us reunited, and we all decided to go into one truck ride. As the train started moving again, we thought we finally made it. There was no way anyone would be looking for us now.

That was until a few miles up the line, our train started going very slow. We noticed a cop car driving on the service road right next to our wagon and in that moment we knew we had to run. As the train came to a full stop, we found ourselves completely trapped with an incoming train blocking the right side, and the cop car being right next to us on the left side. We had no choice but to surrender.

By sheer luck, the cop turned out to be super nice and just let us go on the spot. Still, we were now stuck in a small town in the absolute middle of nowhere. The only option for now was to walk to the closest store, a Dollar General two miles away, and see where we would go from there.

We spent that night under the stars, sleeping on the grass next to the dollar general, with nothing but hills and trees around.