1931: U.S. railroad deaths

Pauli Murray writes in Song in a Weary Throat: Memoir of an American Pilgrimage (Chapter 7, Survival):

"I did not know in that psring of 1931 that I was about to join an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 homeless boys — and a smattering of girls — between the ages of twelve and twenty, products of the Depression, who rode freights or hitchhiked from town to town in search of work. Thousands lived in 'jungles' near railroad tracks, constituting the 'tragic army' which aroused the alarm of the Children's Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor, and created a national problem which eventually led to the establishment of the Civilian Conservation Corps. These young people were part of a larger army of nearly three million homeless unemployed men who also rode the rails and lived in jungles. One railroad official reported that some ten thousand transients per month were traveling through the Southern Pacific freight yards in 1931. In the same year, 831 were killed on the arterial highways and dozens met their deaths under freight trains.

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Hoboes faced the ever-present risk of being shot by armed railroad guards in the big railroad divisions where the freight trains were assembled. When the long trains pulled out of the yards, we had to choose between two dangers. If we ignored the guards who shouted warnings to stay off the train as they ran along the walkways on top of the cars, we became targets for their bullets. If we waited for them to get off, the train had picked up such speed that we risked being thrown under the wheels trying to swing onto a fast-moving boxcar. Another hazard was the fierce cold of windy nights, which forced us to try to keep warm by riding too close to the engine, in the path of hot cinders that blew back upon us. One night the only shelter from the wind I could find was on a flatcar loaded with bridge timber. I crawled into a crevice covered by lon wooden beams and went to sleep. Next morning I discovered that the heavy beams shifted every time the train lurched and this shifting had provided my crevice; a strong enough lurch would have dislodged some of the heaviest beams and crushed me to death.

Crossing the country, I learned to ride cattle trains, fruit-butter-and-egg trains, 'hot shots' (fast express freights), and 'manifestos' (nonstop express freight trains). When refrigerator cars carried citrus fruit, the narrow ice chests, or 'reefers,' at each end of the car were left empty. The hobo's haven was an open reefer which could be entered through the small trapdoor at the top of the empty ice chamber. The upraised door was held by a jack, and if one was small enough to wriggle through the opening one could slither down inside the steel-plated cell floored with wooden slats and ride in comfort out of sight of railroad 'bulls.'"