Perseverance of North American Train Hopping Travels: A Look at the Past & the Present
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on ethnographic materials gathered at three different locations namely Britt, Montreal and online, this thesis looks at aspects of the persistence of contemporary train hopping travels from the perspective of young adult travelers who hopped and traveled via freight trains, once and again, between North American locales. To better understand the current contexts and motivations that continue to entice these travelers to engage in train hopping journeys, I sought to review the historical backgrounds or processes that encouraged earlier forms of train hopping travels in North America especially between the few decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. In considering the orientations of the interlocutors participating in this research in light of the historical accounts associated with earlier train hopping travels, this thesis suggests that a certain category of travelers is likely to continue their involvement in train hopping journeys because they consider themselves particularly advantaged in knowing how to navigate the prohibited space of railroad freight lines. More specifically, these travelers derive a peculiar sense of pride in fashioning a style of train hopping by continuing to improvise new train hopping paths of their own. Such improvised paths are not only uncertain, irregular, unpaved or un-pedestrian-like, hence difficult to navigate, but also diverge from other previous yet ephemeral routes. The willingness of some insiders to the train hopping traveling culture to resume finding or tracing their own fleeting paths to a departing freight railcar machine may account in part for the persistence of train hopping journeys today. At times, a few will never hesitate to encourage or even take other potential travelers on such journeys. Keywords Train hopping, Freight hopping, Tramping, Hoboing, and Catching out
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".