Hobo & Railroad Culture Bibliography

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

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.

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 and, since 2008, has been maintained and updated by BBCRC volunteers with the help of hobo historian Dan Leen and many others. Thanks especially to Arianne Hermida who compiled and edited a major rewrite and reorganization in 2016-17 and to North Bank Fred, our webmaster, who maintains these listings. If you copy large sections of it and then re-print or re-post them on the internet, please cite the BBCRC and provide a link to this page so that people can access the most recent version. Anyone using portions or all of this bibliography in for-profit publications must have advance written permission from the BBCRC.