Richmond to Chester, VT
TLDR: The train went south instead of north, so I jumped off 45 minutes later.
Thanks to advice from some sources, I was in a spot in Richmond pegged for catching northbound CSX trains to the DC area. I figured somewhere in either the DC or Baltimore metropolis it would be possible to jump off. So I returned to the same place where 3 years ago a promising-looking train left me rotting in the yard for 4 hours.
That night in 2022, I had given up in disgust and retreated to a motel room. This time in 2025, I found a train standing still, guessed it was surely northbound per the advice about location, and crawled into a grainer cubbyhole. I resigned myself to the long vigil inside a hiding place so small I couldn't extract my reading from my backpack.
At least the temperature was bearable on this autumn Saturday afternoon. I sat contorted in the cubbyhole for an hour and a half with almost no sensory input at all. The train backed and filled a couple times, going north briefly, then south briefly, with the usual clangs and jolts.
An hour and a half later, to my disgust, the location betrayed me. The train went south toward North Carolina. We shot down the median of I-195 heading deeper into the Confederacy, as the landscape quickly switched from urban to rural, leafy, autumnal. If I had wanted to go south, I would have enjoyed it.
My friend J.B. Hunt
But I had a commitment back in the DC area on Sunday evening, and I didn't want to tell that person either the preposterous truth or a white lie if I couldn't make it. So I committed myself to two lessons of hoboing: number one, don't court injury; number two, the train will stop somewhere. If that hope did not pan out, I was looking at an involuntary journey to the next crew change in Rocky Mount, NC.
Fortunately, the train stuck to familiar industrial habit and 45 minutes later went "into the hole" in the town of Chester, which I had never heard of. From the house numbers on the street, I could tell we were about 12 and a half road miles south of Richmond. I figured that walking, sooner or later, I would encounter the start of the Richmond bus system - hopefully before the house numbers approached zero.
It would have been a great trip, if I wanted to go south
That guess bore fruit. About two and a half hours of walking later, I caught a bus headed north outside an Arby's on US 1. From there, I strung together a few of Richmond's surprisingly useful buses to the restored 19th century train station, which doubles as a FlixBus stop, downtown. That evening, I resentfully rode a FlixBus back to DC. But at least it existed, didn't cost an arm and a leg, and arrived ahead of schedule.
The restored train station [stolen photo]
Three years is too long between trains, especially when they keep failing to take me where I want to go. In these globally warmed times, hoboing can be done 12 months a year except maybe in upper Quebec. But I'm waiting for spring, because you don't want bare trees when you are skulking alongside a yard looking for a train.