Click on a label to read posts from that part of the world.

Train Surfing: Extreme Form of Travel? Or Utterly Stupid?

by Willy Volk (RSS feed) on Apr 28th 2007 at 11:41AM

Train surfing is a thrill-seeking activity that involves riders clinging to or "surfing" on the outside of a moving train. It's dangerous and it's illegal, and there are, of course, numerous potential accidents that can result from it. Nevertheless, it's a pretty extreme form of traveling, so I thought it deserved a mention on Gadling.

This clip shows some train surfing by a German known only as The Trainrider. According to the person who uploaded the clip to YouTube, "Before he died from leukemia, he enjoyed the last year of his life by surfing on trains. Included Germany's fastest Highspeed train ICE with a top speed of 330 km/h(!) No one did that before."

Is The Trainrider for real? Insomnia seems to think the Trainrider is a guy named Alexander Richter who faked the death of his alter-ego -- possibly to sell some videos. Kinda sleazy, if it's true. If you're interested, there's another video after the jump.

If you're chomping at the bit for more, iFilm has a 23-minute film of the Trainrider.

Filed under: Stories, Video

Search Travel Deals

Add your comments

Your comments:

Remember me

E-Mail me when someone replies to this comment

Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments.

When you enter your name and email address, you'll be sent a link to confirm your comment, and a password. To leave another comment, just use that password.

To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br /> tags.