The best advice one could give is to ride with someone who’s done it before. Go downtown to the nearest city where the bars are at. find the dirty kids with instruments and dogs and tell them you want to ride and you’re serious. They might say fuck you, pay me. they might take you on a freight train. But it’s cold, dirty, loud, you might wait on a train for up to 4 days. Those kids you asked might be on heroin or passed out drunk when a good train comes. It’s an always strange and sometimes beautiful lifestyle. Beyond that, find one that is stopped on the mainline. Don’t go, “hopping on the fly” (jump on a moving train) for your first time. Keep your head low until you’re out of the city, and when you go through train yards. Bring ear plugs, water, warm clothes and a couple cans of food. Once you’re on a car, don’t go from one to the next unless the train is stopped. And never ever ever ever step on, or touch the knuckle (the bit where the cars connect.) you never know when the train is going to cut the slack out and lots of people have been maimed or died because they fucked around on the knuckle. I could write a short book on the subject but someone already has. I learned from riding with people who had done it before and taught myself a lot before I found the book but it was very helpful. It taught me about what the train is doing by what the air brakes are doing, what the signals mean. How to find the mainline, how they build the trains. It was written a couple decades ago so does have some bad advice in there too. If you’re super interested in it, it’s called ”Hopping freight trains in America” by Duffy Littlejohn. If you’re super interested in actually going and riding freight trains, dm me. The freight hopping community frowns upon people spreading the knowledge on the internet because people get killed, the get caught by the train cops and blow up spots, it’s just not a good deal. I’ve probably already said too much.