Train-Surfing: A Global Look
Train-Surfing: A Global Look
An attempt at context to an act of madness
In February this year, two teenagers were killed in San Francisco after “surfing” a BART train.1
It took the Bay Area by surprise: thrill-seeking daredevils are aplenty in locally but none have been daring enough to ride atop a BART train car which can run up to 80 miles per hour through tunnels, viaducts and under the San Francisco Bay. The fatalities left two families grieving in truly heartbreaking fashion.2 The quick succession of deaths left those on the other side — the public transit workers — reeling, too; this news cycle occurred during the last month of my own employment at BART before leaving the agency. I recall how it shook many of my colleagues. Train-surfing, and its consequences and emotions, were some of my last souvenirs from BART.
The anxieties inside the agency on a possible train-surfing epidemic were real and not far-fetched; one needs to only look at the train mecca of America, New York City. Its subway system has seen an explosion of train-surfing incidents in the past two years, with 683 and 565 reported incidents in January-September 2023 and all of 2022, respectively.3 4 Six train-surfers died in New York City in 2023, one more than the total from 2018 through 2022, combined.5 In September 2023, New York City and MTA launched an anti-train-surfing campaign to stem the sharp rise.6 In the same month BART train surfers were killed, a viral video caught a man train-surfing in Chicago.7 A month later, in March, a 15-year-old boy and a teenage girl were killed while train-surfing the Washington Metro in separate incidents.8 Local media in Chicago and Washington, like San Francisco’s, all siloed from each other, loudly wondered if their fair cities caught a New York-origin virus.
A cursory look for context around train-surfing will reveal quickly this is not a New York issue, or a San Francisco issue, or an American issue. Timeline-speaking, train-surfing has been practiced for decades. (If applying its less thrilling father, train-hopping, or its most famous practitioner, the hobo, to the train-surfing genealogy, then train-surfing has existed as long as trains.) To be more precise, train-surfing in the modern, urban context has existed since at least the 1980s. The Mecca of train-surfing – if one deserves such a terrible honor – is not New York City, but Berlin, which has seen two loosely defined eras of train-surfing in the early 1990s and the 2010s. And Berlin’s ignominy casts a long shadow, extending to the other side of the world in Brazil.9
Train-surfing and its practitioners are universally met with scorn and horror by the authorities and the lay public. In the media, local reports of train-surfing are very often reported as evidence of a new strain of lawlessness and anarchy taking root and growing in their cities.10 But piecing together the volume of media reports and academic literature on train-surfing reveals perhaps it is the exact opposite – that it is rather an evidence of societal malaise, already existent and thriving, imposed harshly on the margins and a terminal symptom of those yearning to find any escape from it however possible. This is not my naive grandstanding; this is what train-surfers express in their own words, across the world and over decades.
In each case in New York City, Berlin and Rio de Janeiro, train-surfing peaks with each city’s own turbulent times and challenges: rising displacement, growing economic inequalities, and even world-historic events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall. While not all victims who died from train-surfing have been affected by these urban challenges (both victims in San Francisco, one in Washington D.C. and another victim in Berlin were model students with stable families and bright futures, per local postmortem features), many others who have been active in the train-surfing community live through these obstacles on a daily basis. When viewed through that lens, it becomes possible to bind these stochastic acts of thrill and madness into an interlinked global phenomenon, one that gives more credence and understanding and even a little grace for why anyone would do such a thing.
A Strong Disclaimer
I can foresee writing about this taboo topic may be misunderstood as a tacit endorsement for the practice of train-surfing. That cannot be further from my personal view: train-surfing is one of the most reckless and stupid thing any city kid can do and should not be encouraged by any means. As a commuter, a former public transit employee, and a believer in public transit, I believe train-surfing is anathema to all which I identify.
Wie ein Engel
It is no coincidence that the birth of train-surfing in Germany began on the eve of reunification and took off when the Berlin Wall fell. The first instance of train-surfing was reported in Hamburg in 1988 but spread quickly to Berlin. The fascinating 2015 paper “Identities in transit: the (re)connections and (re)brandings of Berlin’s municipal railway infrastructure after 1989” by Samuel Merrill in the Journal of Historical Geography seeks to connect how Berliners relearned their own U-Bahn and S-Bahn networks in the days and months immediately after the Wall’s fall. Many youths chose to relearn both halves of unified Berlin atop the old S-Bahn train cars, which months earlier would have been physically impossible to traverse.
The train-surfers were known as S-Bahn Surfen, who took advantage of the old, slower S-Bahn rolling stock and low staffing levels at its stations. The Berlin S-Bahn was cut in two with the construction of the Wall and scarred with operational idiosyncrasies; in-train custom checks were routine and East Berlin S-Bahn trains ran through without stopping when trains crossed into West Berlin territory.11 As U-Bahn became the primary mass transit network in West Berlin, S-Bahn became East Berlin’s. Stations on the West Berlin-operated U-Bahn lines (now U6 and U8 lines) and East Berlin-operated S-Bahn stations close to the Wall were disused, with watchposts installed on underground platforms for border guards and transport police, barbed wire across the concourse, and live third rail to deter any underground escapees from East to West. These central Berlin stations remained closed for 30 years and became known as “ghost-stations”, or Geisterbahnhöfe – christened by Berliners to whom the guards were “observed as spectral figures” standing on near-pitch-black platforms as their trains ran full speed without stopping.1213
On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell; the velocity in which the Wall fell stunned denizens on both sides of the wall. The historic event “triggered an intense period of exploration as East and West Berliners rushed to rediscover the parts of the city” that were once closed to them, including the ghost-stations.14 Berliner photographers and train enthusiasts flooded into the disused stations and tunnels to capture them frozen in time. Theater producers used the ghost-stations to host plays, taking advantage of a total administrative vacuum in these new urban spaces. The city-wide euphoria after the fall was shared most acutely and intimately in the overcrowded U-Bahn and S-Bahn trains, now carrying two cities in one. Jannowitzbrücke U-Bahn station was the first disused station to re-open for service on Saturday, November 11; that weekend, 800,000 East Germans visited West Berlin via train, and some U-Bahn stations were closed due to over-crowding. (Video below is a VCR record of that Sunday, November 12 on the Berlin U-Bahn) The West German public transit operator BVG granted East German citizens free fares through 1990, continuing the post-unification U-Bahn over-crowding for several more months.15 All ghost-stations would reopen in phases through 1993.
As Berliners spilled into its trains, its youths climbed atop it, seeking a far dramatic but nevertheless kindred thirst for exploration of their new city. In a city swept in euphoria, anxieties and unease about new norms and authorities, especially in the East, the youth used and abused the urban rail infrastructure to “adopt rebellious subjectivities and identities while pushing at, and overcoming, previously accepted boundaries during a period when they were increasingly exposed to the payoffs of anti-authoritarianism.”16 The ephemeral sense of total freedom and lack of old authoritarian counters mutated into a rash of racially and politically motivated attacks (i.e. fights between far-right and left-wing groups) inside U-Bahn stations in the early 1990s, leading to a sharp rise of perception of the Berlin U-Bahn as a symbol of post-reunification disorder and crime. The disreputation was so intense that the designers who created the bright yellow BVG iconography and livery, still in famous use today, hoped that the color and signages would deter vandalism and visible disorder in “making the environment…slightly more bearable.”17
The price of freedom cost dearly many S-Bahn-Surfen riders. Between 1989 and 1995, 41 train surfing accidents were recorded in Berlin U-Bahn and S-Bahn. Eighteen of the 41 died. A 1998 study from the Humboldt University analyzed 14 autopsy records and found the following18:
Most fatalities occurred on the S-Bahn and riding atop older, slower rolling stock
All but one were male; ages ranged between 13 and 25 years with most between 16 and 20
Most accidents occurred between 8 p.m. and midnight
More than half were affected by alcohol but no medications or drugs
All but one suffered “polytraumatisation” injuries, with injuries to the head most common and severe
The new crisis of train-surfing fatalities in Berlin were widely covered and eulogized by artists. In one famous example from 1992, the former East German rock band The Puhdys’ music video of Wie Ein Engel (“Like an Angel”) recreates a band of train-surfers awash in youthful thrill and ecstasy until one of their comrades falls and dies on the tracks. The fallen train surfer, wearing a leather jacket, lies on the tracks, eyes open at the end of the video, still and lifeless.
Fuck the System
The S-Bahn-Surfen returned with force in the 2010s, and they captured it all in high definition for the world to see.
The most famous ambassadors of the new era of Berliner train-surfers were the Berlin Kidz, a Kreuzberg-based artist collective best known for their iconic graffiti in seemingly impossible locations in high-rise apartments and buildings in Berlin. Along with their graffiti snaking down multi-story buildings, Berlin Kidz made their Internet fame by filming escapades atop the yellow U-Bahn trains. Berlin Kidz have released two documentaries, Fuck the System and Fuck the System 2, and other videos on YouTube and elsewhere which accrued hundreds of thousands of views. In these videos, the train-surfers push the act of train-surfing to the extreme by riding a bicycle, juggling a soccer ball and even jumping from a moving train into a nearby river. A BVG spokesperson in 2016 called the rash of videos of train-surfing, including those from Berlin Kidz, an “incitement to suicide…they are not giving a thought to the kids who might copy them.”19
Maintaining ironclad anonymity, Berlin Kidz never speak to the media on their intentions or goals. In understanding Berlin Kidz, the best resource has been Thomas von Wittich, a street photographer who followed Berlin Kidz for four years, and has provided a few interviews available in English. According to von Wittich, the members are lifelong Berliners who “are not happy with the circumstances the city is offering” such as gentrification and increased surveillance.20 Berlin underwent a wave of gentrification and displacement, with a vibrant counter-offensive to stop rising rents, evictions and housing speculation, and the group’s home in Kreuzberg was at the geographical heart. Berlin Kidz’s politics extend beyond local politics and remain faithfully anti-authority on all levels; in the Fuck the System 2 trailer, members can be seen repeatedly kicking a cardboard cutout of then-Chancellor Angela Merkel.
While immensely popular online and influential in the local graffiti scene, Berlin Kidz’ impact of encouraging other youths to train-surf may be precisely unknowable. In the decade between 2013 and 2023, the BVG counted eight train-surfing fatalities: a 22-year-old on the S-Bahn in 2013; a 19-year-old on the S-Bahn in 2014; a 13-year-old on the U-Bahn in 2014; another 19-year-old on the S-Bahn in 2015; a 22-year-old on the U-Bahn in 2016; a 15-year-old on the S-Bahn in 2022; and a 19-year-old on the S-Bahn in 2023; and a 14-year-old on the U-Bahn in 2023. 21222324252627Last November, the newspaper Berliner Zeitung worriedly asked if train-surfing “was back in vogue”.28 Between BVG’s comment in 2016 and renewed local media anxieties in the post-COVID years, the new generation of S-Bahn-Surfen has now cast a long shadow over Berlin’s public transit operators approaching a decade in a few years.
The Brazilian Connection
Will Berlin get a reprieve? Not until the anger subsides. Anger – at authorities, at society, at the world, at themselves – is a key fuel driving both Berlin Kidz. It is also the dominant emotion driving their oft-cited inspiration, the pixação movement in São Paulo in Brazil. Pioneers in high-rise graffiti, the pixação movement have been tagging the sprawling Brazilian metropolis since the 1980s, blending daredevil acts, runic graffiti and messages on widening socioeconomic inequality. With an estimated 5,000 pixadores working anonymously in Sao Paulo as of 2016, their art is meant to be an “assault on the city”, to remind the city elite of their consequences of neglecting their downtrodden; the movement “a reflection of the absence of the state in the life of that person who decided to become a pixador.”29
Brazilian youths, like their German counterparts, sought out freedom and a release through train-surfing. In the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro in the 1980s and 1990s, adolescents living in the impoverished suburbs far inland would imitate surfers in the local beaches of Ipanema or Copacabana atop a train moving 50 miles per hour. The train-surfing craze exploded around Rio at the final years of the 20th century, with some towns having train-surfing associations. But the communal thrill led to truly staggering casualty figures. Around 150 train surfers were killed in 1987 alone at the height of the craze, per the Los Angeles Times.30 In the 1990s, more than 100 fatalities were recorded.31 A major reason for a far greater casualty count are the overhead electrical wires webbing Rio’s commuter train network; contact with exposed electrical high-tension wires – running 3,000 volts – was a “relatively frequent occurrence” leading to complex and horrific injuries, per a 2000 study from Brazil examining electrical burns caused by high tension railway overhead cables.32
Train-surfing in the outskirts of Rio withered away following an “intense crackdown” in the 1990s.33 But its spirit has latched onto another form of public transit – buses. Adolescents aged between 12 and 16 and living in the impoverished suburbs of Brazilian cities are now riding atop and on the sides of public buses. Like the train-surfing associations in the 1980s, the bus-surfers also have associations and clubs. The New York Times followed one, Loucos do Surf, or the Crazy Surfers, riding atop buses in northeastern Brazil in 2017 for a travelogue published four years later.34
Loucos do Surf hail from the predominantly Black neighborhoods of Olinda. These neighborhoods, like so many in Brazil, have seen a sharp increase of homicides amid growing inequality, rising unemployment rates especially for youth, and increasing poverty and disinvestment from local governments in the past 15 years. One member told The Times he began bus-surfing because local authorities demolished the only soccer field in his neighborhood. Others found political protest in bus-surfing against the rising price of bus fares. The Times’ travelogue teems with desperately bored teenagers thirsting to exchange their current circumstances for any chance to escape from it all. The story tragically comes to a close when the ringleader of Loucos do Surf is killed near his home by a gunman at point-blank range at the age of 18, and the group falls apart.35
“Everybody’s going through a lot of shit”
When people discuss train-surfing, especially in the light of so many deaths in the United States in the, past two years. it is frequently discussed as a new and disturbing trend with no comparisons and equals. As we have seen, train-surfing is nothing new or exclusive to American cities.
Why do these kids do this? One thread connecting American, German and Brazilian train-surfers is that they consistently call themselves “artists”. Teenagers who risked their lives train-surfing in New York City repeatedly spoke about how this is a “form of expression”.36 They also readily admit this is an artform reserved for the truly desperate. Michael – a 19-year-old New Yorker who quit train-surfing after a friend died surfing the J train in Brooklyn – talked to Curbed how he has been dealing with several mental health issues, attempted suicide and have visited numerous outpatient centers and treatments to no avail through the byzantine and underfunded mental health system in New York City.
Michael said the following, which was particularly illuminating on how one even dares to surf a train:37
No one says one day that they’re just going to get on top of a train. Everybody’s going through a lot of shit. I don’t know what, but it’s enough for them to start doing this…Going through that [mental health] system so many times, and you know it’s broken, and you know it’s not going to do anything for you. You just start to look at other options.
Social media platforms, like Instagram and TikTok, can indeed be big propagators to susceptible teenagers. One New Yorker teen shared with Curbed he quit train-surfing but went back one more time to capture footage of him riding atop a Subway train with the New York sky blood-orange due to wildfire smoke coming in from Canada; that video got 6 million views. Like the teenagers in San Francisco who lost their lives, the allure of Instagram fame does play a major part in recruiting the newest generation of train-surfers. Spokespeople in Berlin, New York City, and San Francisco have called for tighter regulation of social media content which includes train-surfing to stop the flow of information. Tighter enforcement can make an impact — but it is limited in answering the pre-Internet-era origin question in why a teenager joins the train-surfing craze in the first place.
What can cities do? The 1998 German study examining Berlin train-surfing autopsies did identify “structural design possibilities… to be the most important approach to prevention of accidents in the future.”38 A newer, faster generation of S-Bahn trains, delivered in full by the late 1990s, did peter out the first generation of Berlin train-surfers. Other design alterations with well-used egresses in station platforms and structures can help too. Such fixes can prove costly (especially to chronically cash-strapped public transit agencies) and at odds with station access and agency operations and present a new cycle of challenges.
For four decades, train-surfing has remained an extreme but sticky form of societal disobedience and thrill-seeking among a very small slice of young people, mostly teenage boys. For those who seek train-surfing, it has remained an intoxicating option to escape from the turmoils of their own inner and outer worlds. These teenagers and young adults in Berlin, Brazil and New York City have spoken with their feet that the roof of a fast-moving train feels safer than being at home, or in their neighborhood. From Berlin Kidz to Loucos do Surf to Michael’s crew in New York City, the wayward adolescents found a community for them in lives often socially wrecked and displaced. For not letting your crew down as they surf a train was enough cause for one more train-surfing ride. In their own words and actions, they express lucidly why they take the risk.
Train-surfing may serve as an indictment to the current state of cities, expressed from the margins. Communal spaces (public spaces, third places, etc.) where teenagers of all backgrounds can congregate safely, unsupervised and unsurveilled are declining in cities around the globe. In countries like the United States and Brazil, growing wealth inequality has strained young people and their families to the breaking point in the past 15 years. For Loucos do Surf in 2017, their time coincided with a 29 percent youth unemployment rate during the worst recession in Brazil’s history and a ten-year-rise in homicides among its Black population.39 For the New Yorker train-surfers of 2022, their time coincided with a 10-point-jump in the city’s poverty rate due to the COVID-19 pandemic and one in 4 New Yorkers under the age of 18 living in poverty.40 As Michael said, when so much seems broken at an age when you begin piecing together the world around you, you start looking at other options.
During the research for this story, I was particularly moved by the death of Ka’Von Wooden – the friend who got Michael to stop train-surfing. The death of Wooden – a railfan and transit photographer with a popular Instagram account of New York City Subway trains – received an outpouring of remembrance from his friends, many of whom were train-surfers themselves. One answer published in ANIMAL Magazine from a friend of Wooden eulogizing him and why he is quitting train-surfing stuck with me. The sincere eulogy really drove home for me that indeed these are all lost kids, looking for directions atop a singularly moving train:41
I’mma a miss him as a person in general. He was a kind-hearted person and just someone who was fascinated with trains. We were his only real friends, so that’s the reason he use to hang out with us. Some rail fanners would bully him cause he had “autism,” so when he was around us, he felt like himself and acted like himself. He made sure everyone around him was smiling and everyone was chilling. He didn’t cause any trouble and just enjoyed being with us in general. He never really did anything bad and it’s sad to see how he went out, but i mean that’s the risk you take when you surf. I was kind of shocked when I found out, ‘cause he was never really the person to top surf. During the big event, he didn’t even surf, he was just in the back of the train messing with it ‘cause he was just a kid who was fascinated with trains.
There is no longer that rush anymore—that’s the only reason we did it, because of that adrenaline rush we got from doing it and when that was gone, we just found other ways to get it through the tunnels and graffiti. I mean some other people are still gonna stay surfing even though they said they “quit” because they are addicted to that adrenaline rush and they don’t really care about the risk of losing their life. That’s how everyone was, we didn’t really care about the risk and thought it would never happen to us even though prior incidents that happened due to surfing, but this one hit home because he was a close friend to us, and it just opened our eyes of how this can happen to any of us.
https://abc7news.com/train-surfing-dangerous-social-media-trend-teens-deaths-bart/14421204/
https://sfstandard.com/2024/02/13/surfing-bart-trains-moms-beg-kids-stop-after-sons-deaths/
https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/02/14/subway-surfers-sex-7-train-queens-mta
https://www.curbed.com/2023/08/subway-surfing-teenagers-social-media-quitting-mta.html
https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/02/14/subway-surfers-sex-7-train-queens-mta
https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/635-23/mayor-adams-governor-hochul-mta-launch-subway-surfing-kills-ride-inside-stay-alive-public
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/video-shows-man-surfing-cta-train/
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/its-horrible-parents-of-15-year-old-who-died-subway-surfing-in-june-warn-about-stunt/3558495/
There is a far greater train-surfing scene in Ukraine, Russia, South Africa, and India, but I narrowed down the scope of this post as there were less available literature and the vast majority occurs outside urban rail networks
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/video-shows-man-surfing-cta-train/
Merrill, Samuel. “Identities in transit: the (re)connections and (re)brandings of Berlin’s municipal railway infrastructure after 1989”, Journal of Historical Geography, Volume 50, October 2015, p. 80-82
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_station
Merrill, p. 81
Merrill, p. 83
Merrill, p. 84
Merrill, p. 83
Merrill, p. 89
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/berlin-authorities-condemn-youtube-craze-for-train-surfing-6fftvdjnp
https://berlinstreetart.com/berlin-kidz-thomas-von-wittich-interview/
https://web.archive.org/web/20200111155634/https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin-aktuell/article114745678/S-Bahn-Surfer-rutscht-unter-Zug-und-wird-schwer-verletzt.html
https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/polizei-justiz/19-jahriger-stirbt-beim-s-bahn-surfen-6613330.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20210903122839/https://www.welt.de/vermischtes/article139435837/S-Bahnsurfer-stirbt-nach-Kollision-mit-Bruecke.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20210704142730/https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/berlin-kreuzberg-22-jaehriger-prallt-gegen-bruecke-auf-u-bahntrasse-tot/14595302.html
https://today.rtl.lu/news/world/a/1933198.html
https://www.rnd.de/panorama/berlin-toter-19-jaehriger-auf-zug-entdeckt-war-der-junge-mann-ein-s-bahn-surver-NKRD4AYCVJPEPELZXITHXQTI5U.html
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/mensch-metropole/bahn-surfen-wieder-im-trend-14-jaehriger-in-berlin-lebensgefaehrlich-verletzt-li.2160568
Ibid.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jan/06/pixacao-the-story-behind-sao-paulos-angry-alternative-to-graffiti
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-06-26-mn-8167-story.html
Ibid.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/travel/brazil-bus-surfing.html
Ibid.
Ibid.
https://www.curbed.com/2023/08/subway-surfing-teenagers-social-media-quitting-mta.html
Ibid.
Strauch, H, et al.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/travel/brazil-bus-surfing.html
https://www.fox5ny.com/news/child-poverty-assitance-nyc-report
https://animalnewyork.com/2022/12/08/death-of-subway-surfing-teen-shakes-up-transit-community/
The statement "East Berlin S-Bahn trains ran through without stopping when trains crossed into West Berlin territory" is doubly confused - it was WEST Berlin U-BAHN trains that ran through without stopping when trains crossed into EAST Berlin territory.