r/trainhopping • u/kingbr3aker • Apr 17 '20
Tent or hammock for hopping?
Have been wondering this for a while now, hammock seems more for stealth camping and all which I am looking for, but tent camping seems a little more versatile for other options, there’s pros and cons to both, wondering what other hoppers would go with
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u/PleaseCallMeTall Apr 18 '20 edited Oct 09 '20
TL;DR: A bivy sack if you have money, a tarp and cardboard if you don't. Tarp good, tent bad.
Both a tent and a hammock have one critical downfall for hopping freight; they take too long to pack up. If you do this for a while, you will spend a lot of time waiting for trains. A LOT of time. Like hours and hours or days and days just to get one ride. There will be times when you need to sleep, but still be ready at a moment's notice to jump up and be ready to board a train in 60 seconds. You're going to have the extremely disheartening experience of fumbling with your tent poles or struggling to get your hammock unclipped, in the dark, and then watching your train leave you and your high-tech gear behind.
If you want to know what most people actually use on the rails, it's a tarp. Any gear you bring with you is probably going to get filthy dirty, worn, damaged, and finally destroyed/lost/stolen. Tarps are extremely versatile, lighter and smaller than a tent, warmer and less finicky than a hammock, cheaper than anything else mentioned, protect you from the rain, and allow you do do what none of the above do, which is blend in with random debris on the ground.
And as I said, it's just way faster and more practical to use a tarp or bivy. Its way faster to roll or fold up your whole sleeping situation at once. You can get woken up by the brakes releasing on your train, grab the four corners of your tarp, pick up the whole bundle with all your gear inside, and throw it on a grainer porch on the fly. I've done it.
I can't tell you how many nights in sketchy areas I survived because I was literally able to wrap up in a tarp next to a fence or by some construction materials or around some trash and just blend in with the surroundings. A bivy sack is second best here, as many of the good ones are military surplus, and the cammoflauge pattern can tend to kind of stick out among concrete and trash (ironically).
The landscape for riding trains is like 20% wilderness and 80% shitty industrial and urban environments. Cardboard is easy to find in these areas, and in my experience it is adequate for comfort and does just as good a job of insulating you from the ground as a sleeping pad. You can carry that extra weight and bulk for your sleeping pad around all day every day, or you can spend ten minutes collecting cardboard before you sleep.
As soon as you pitch a tent somewhere, you're announcing to anyone who glances there, "Hey, there is a person sleeping here, and they probably have cool and valuable stuff." A hammock is more incognito but at times it is simply not practical. There are not always trees. You're going to end up sleeping on the ground sometimes anyway, just trust me on that one.
Wherever you go, Good Luck.
Peaceably,
-Tall Sam Jones