Library and Online Bibliography

BBCRC maintains both a physical library, located in our Western Pacific/Pacific Fruit Express Reefer car dating from 1923, and an online bibliography, which includes, as far as we know, the most extensive bibliography of hobo-related materials ever compiled.

The library collection, known as the "Hobo Library" contains a wide variety of materials - hobo and railworker history, travelogues and related subjects, and includes published books, 'zines, unpublished manuscripts, films, music, and other materials. More information on the Hobo Library can be found here.

Our online Hobo and Railroad Culture bibliography includes listing of books, magazine and newspaper articles, reports, zines, films, and music on historical and modern-day railroad culture - hobos and train riding, railroad history (with an emphasis on rail workers and labor), moniker culture and other related topics. The Bibliography is divided into the following sections:

Part 1 — Railroaders, Boomers, General and Local Railroad History
Part 2 — Hobos, Tramps, Trainriding, Monikers, Wobblies
Part 3 — Films, Videos, DVDs, and Podcasts

This bibliography is constantly being updated and improved and represents a lot of original research. We believe it to be the most comprehensive bibliography on this topic anywhere - but it is still a work in progress. If you know of additional materials to list, or if you have corrections, please let us know. Try to provide as much detail as possible and follow the same general format we have used for listings here. For some of the listings we have a few sentences of description attached. These are of course subjective and have been submitted by many different people. If you want to submit a review (short descriptive comments or annotations) to the many entries that don't yet have them, please do so. Contact us at "info@bbcrc.org".

The Hobo Bibliography was first compiled by Shoefly Jay as an academic project and, since 2008, has been maintained and updated by BBCRC volunteers including hobo historian Dan Leen, Arianne Hermida, who compiled and edited a major rewrite and reorganization in 2016-17, Nate, who has both helped organize our physical collection and provided much input to the online bibliography and to North Bank Fred, our webmaster, who maintains these listings.

We are open to future academic collaborations with researchers and institutions with an interest in these topics. Researchers are welcome to download copies of the bibliography for their own use (please credit BBCRC as appropriate). As this is a living document which is constantly being expanded and improved, please just link to this page rather than posting a static version of this bibliography elsewhere.

Use of portions or all of this bibliography in for-profit publications must be with advance written permission from the BBCRC.