ride the rails

ride the rail(s)

To travel on a vehicle mounted on rails (especially a train or streetcar). I know it takes a lot longer than flying, but I love riding the rail from Portland to Vancouver. People often romanticize riding the rails across the country as hobos did during the Great Depression, but I doubt many would actually find much pleasure in it.
See also: ride
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

ride the rails

travel by rail, especially without a ticket. North American
See also: rail, ride
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary
See also:
  • ride the rail(s)
  • ride by
  • ride away
  • Are you still riding the goat?
  • riding
  • every last man of us/them
  • ride off
  • ride over
  • everyone
  • everyone and his brother
References in periodicals archive
And on top of day trippers, railways enthusiasts also make a bee-line for places like Porthmadog just to ride the rails, staying for days and pumping cash into the local economy.
Los Angeles World Airports spokesperson Nancy Castles advised "Ride the rails to Union Station and catch our FlyAway [shuttle] to LAX, or ride the Green Line directly into LAX, or, if they really must drive, to really plan for several hours in advance of that."
Ride the rails with TV'S Ben Fogle as he takes us on his Top 10 train trips
Take the scenic route and relax in comfort as you ride the rails and enjoy splendid winter scenery across the Sierra to Reno aboard Amtrak's famous California Zephyr.
(2.) Even Nick Adams does not always ride the rails. In "Big Two-Hearted River" for instance, we know he has paid for his ticket to Seney (where, as it turned out, "there was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country") because he has been allowed to "check" his stuff: "Nick sat down on the bundle of canvas and bedding the baggage man had pitched out of the door of the baggage car" (163).
They walk, hitch and ride the rails to Spain to attend the funeral of the mother they never knew, and rarely speak, except when engaging with the slightly more colorful people they encounter along the way, who trigger in them either shared alienation or intense rivalry.
He will mine for gold, fish for salmon, experience the life of an electric lineman, log in Alaska's Southeast Panhandle, ride the rails and much more.
-- Grammy Award winner Patty Loveless will once again ride the rails as the special guest on the 2007 Santa Train, a holiday project that benefits children in the Appalachia region, co-sponsored by Abingdon, Va.-based Food City (K-VA-T Food Stores, Inc.), CSX Transportation, and the Kingsport, Tenn.
It was one thing for a dissertation completed only months after the Blue Line's opening to speculate that few would ride the rails. But now that 70,000 people are riding each weekday Richmond should have explained who they are and where they are going.
To take advantage of a billboard streetcar on Toronto's trendy Queen Street West, Lee Jeans staged 30 impromptu street fashion shows, blanket postering, pop music and sampling, and invited the media to ride the rails on the Buddy Lee-branded streetcar with the Lee Jeans Squad.
You don't gotta ride the rails to be the next big thing (though it sure don't hurt).
RIDE THE RAILS TO MEXICO Embrace the magic of a timeless culture when you travel by private train on the Sierra Madre Express to Mexico's magnificent Copper Canyon.
He hopes that his school will close down, leaving him and his best friend free to ride the rails to the wheat harvests in the Dakotas.
And Charlie must find the 17-year-old niece of the man who taught him how to ride the rails. The search for the missing girl takes place on the "High Line" a bastion of racism along the tracks of the Pacific Northwest.