"On my first trip, my friend and I traveled the first leg on top of a boxcar. That is not a particularly relaxing way to travel either, and was made less so in those days by hot cinders from the engine, particularly if the train went through any tunnels. Luckily, ours didn't. But the greatest danger was that a railroad dick, as the company police are derisively called, would spot us and use his club to force us to jump while the train was going at a relatively high speed. I heard many stories of incidents of this kind, mostly from men who were explaining why they walked with a limp, were nursing broken ribs or carrying a broken arm in a crude sling. We rode that way this time because the boxcars were all locked and the run from the railroad yards on the West Side of mid-Manhattan to the yards in Croton-on-Hudson is slow and relatively safe."