No matter how hard you try, sooner or later you are going to have to take on a villain and his goons atop a moving train. The best advice we can offer is: Don’t. Trains are lot tougher to handle today than they were in Indy’s day. Even when traveling slowly, a modern freight train rolls about 50 to 60 miles per hour, compared to 15 or 25 miles per hour in those halcyon days of Utah in 1912. Granted, sometimes you don’t have a choice. If the bad guys are hot on your tail, by all means scurry up a boxcar and man your ground. Just be smart about it.
1. APPROACH THE TRAIN ON HORSEBACK.
Ride your faithful steed alongside the moving train. Keep an eye out for ladders or steps. When these are in sight, spur the horse to speed up and, keep pace with the moving train. Grab hold of the boxcar’s ladder, unhook your feet from the stirrups, and goad the horse to ride ahead. His body will slip gently between your legs. Flex your arm muscles and pull yourself up so your legs don’t drop to the tracks below. Find some decent footing and start climbing. The rungs of the ladder will go to the top of the boxcar. Keep climbing until you reach horizontal ground.
2. STAY LOW.
Even to passengers tucked safely inside the club car, trains feel a lot like dinghies on the open sea. They rock. They roll. They sway, fishtail, and shimmy. Your chances of getting through this ordeal are better if you keep your center of gravity low. Keep your head down, bend your knees, and crouch as you walk briskly across the top of the train. Watch your footing. Some boxcars have pronounced seams across the tops where the sheet metal is welded together; you don’t want to trip on them. Others may have skylights or other openings that could spell disaster.
3. DON’T GO WITH THE FLOW.
As soon as you can, note the direction in which the train is traveling-then run in the opposite direction. This sounds counter-intuitive, but it makes perfect sense; as you jump the gaps between boxcars, the train will be moving forward under you, requiring you to jump a shorter distance. If you run with the train, you will always be forced to jump harder and faster to get over the gaps.
4. BE ALERT.
You’d think there would be nothing between you and the sky so high off the ground, but nothing is further from the truth. There are entirely too many things that could go wrong on top of a moving train. As a train takes a turn, its boxcars tilt. When that happens, hug the boxcar roof or you could be thrown onto the tracks or between the cars. Avoid climbing between cars during this time. The gap between two cars narrows on one side as they take a turn. Get between them and you’ll be squashed like a bug. Keep an eye out for power lines, low-slung lampposts, signage, mail-delivery platforms, tunnel entrances, and angry rhinoceroses. Watch out for everything. Everything, you hear?
5. KNOW YOUR GOAL.
We all agree this is not the optimum way to travel. You’re there to do a job, so get it done and get out of there. If you are trying to gain entrance to a specific car, pinpoint it in the distance and work your way toward it deliberately. If you must engage in fisticuffs with another party, be brisk about it. Bend your knees, use short, focused blows, and dispatch the thug mercilessly. Work the face, solar plexus, and gut. No high-flying roundhouse punches. Keep in mind: Your foe will be desperate. As we have tried to make clear, it’s not fun up there.
6. EXITING THE TRAIN.
In Indy’s day, locomotives had to stop often to take on water or coal to fuel their engines. Modern trains are powered by diesel fuel or electricity and don’t have to stop unless they need to pick up freight or passengers. During the long stretches between stops, the engineers may nudge the throttle up to 100 miles per hour and beyond. You don’t want to be on top of the train when that happens. When the train approaches a rail yard or station, descend the ladder to the last rung, wait till the train stops, and drop off. You may be tempted to drop into a boxcar opening and ride it to your final destination. Before you do, just be sure you’re not leaping into something deadly, such as a pit of live snakes.
July 4th, 2009 at 11:35 am
Your idea about not running in the direction of the train is baloney. If you’re on board the train, you too have the same forward velocity (that’s why you’re stationary relative to the roof). Jumping off makes no difference: you don’t suddenly lose all the speed you had by virtue of having formerly stood on the train, and you won’t find it any harder (or easier) jumping between carriages.
Your suggestion is equivalent to saying that if you got in a helicopter and floated over the ground for an hour, when you touched down again you’d find the Earth beneath you had completed 1/24 of a complete rotation.
November 4th, 2009 at 11:33 am
I liked your ideas - and disagree with robert. You have a sense about physics, but haven’t had the experience necessary to keep your pie hole shut about this one. True, it wasn’t explained perfectly, but that’s no excuse.
Throw a ball out your car when you’re driving down the freeway. If you threw it towards where you’re going, you’d notice that the ball quickly reverses direction, relative to car. In fact, the ball might not even make it past your hood before it “changes direction”. As soon as an object leaves its footing from a train and a car, it leaves the forces that were keeping it going 50, 60, or 70 mph. And yes, this makes it easier to jump a gap like that.