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I’m writing this after rereading Kenneth Alsopp’s classic Hard Travellin’ after a gap of some nearly fifty years. It is, needless, to say, a book of its time but what a poetic piece of extensive research it is. It’s a piece of Americana but the book also opens up the question in the title above. I suppose ‘riding the rails’ has happened in an almost obscure and virtually unrecorded way in this country with children and trainspotters. Steve McQueen’s film The Blitz features children and evacuees sort of stowing away and my mate has written down his memories of ‘riding the rails’ in his A Film Called Happiness    by Jon Seagrave / Jonny Fluffypunk ‘You are fifteen years old. It is 6 in the morning and it is February; it is pitch dark and freezing cold, and you are huddled foetal, shivering...