The Train to America

The hostel's 60 beds are full and there are queues for the two bathrooms. Some people are sleeping on the floor.

Most are leaving Central America because of poverty and violence. Those lucky enough to get jobs in their home countries might earn only $2-$3 for 12-hour days as builders, plasterers, farm hands. Lionel, 17, is fleeing El Salvador because gangs had threatened him with a hand grenade. He wants to reach Virginia, where his sister lives, to become a painter.

The youngest is 16-year-old Fernanda, a Guatemalan. A single mother, she had left her six-month-old son with a sister and was going to America to get a job. "She didn't come back to the hostel last night," one of the migrants confides. "We think she's on the game."

As night falls, the police deliver a new arrival, Hector, 39, from Guatemala. He had been released from hospital and the authorities didn't know what to do with him. Two months earlier he had fallen from a freight train and lost a leg. He hobbles in on improvised crutches - a chair leg and a branch. "I have a wife and three children in Guatemala," he whispers, "but I can't tell them what's happened to me. I can't go home like this." He has one thing to say to Said and the others. "Friends," he urges, "I beg you to turn back. Don't get the train. I don't want the same thing to happen to you." No one speaks. Said looks at the ground.

In the morning, Said and Eugenia move from the hostel to the train tracks. They have run out of time at the hostel, and the stress and boredom of waiting is getting to them.

By now the migrants have formed groups. Said, who has ridden the trains before, has become a leader. "People helped me to make this journey before,'" he says. "Now it's my turn." There are about 20 in his group.

Two days later the train finally arrives. Said requisitions a wagon, and instructs his group to climb on to the top. Others - including Fernanda and Marbella - force open wagon doors and scramble inside. Not a good idea, says Said: "Those doors close, they're gonna suffocate."

Said has coached his group not to be nervous. "Let me tell you something about the train," he warns. "If you're afraid of the train, the train gonna kill you."

It is 10 at night. The locomotive shunts back and over the tracks, collecting wagons full of gravel, sand and oil. It takes hours to assemble the kilometre-long train. Hundreds of migrants run from the shadows to claim their places; Eugenia ties herself on to a narrow platform above the wheels. "I'm really scared," she says, when Said is out of earshot.

The train pulls out of Arriaga with a roar, Said and his group on the last carriage. Now they are moving, there is no going back. If someone falls under the wheels, the train will not stop.

Rain begins to pour, and the migrants make capes of refuse sacks. Said stands guard between two carriages, poised to fight off anyone who might attack the train. There are the maras to worry about - the gangs who rob, rape and kill - but the worst assailants, he says, are the "hillbillies" armed with AK 47s and machetes. He had met them on this route before: "Last year I got robbed. They hit me with machetes, nine times on my back and they robbed all my money."

There are some 30 people perched on the roof of the wagon. Mitchell, a Guatemalan, passes a machete to the group at the end of the train, a bunch of timid young Guatemalans, including a 12-year-old girl. "It's for self-defence," he says. "If anyone tries to jump on this wagon, we have to fight them off."

Forty-five minutes into the journey, the train reaches a swamp. There are voices below, people running alongside. Said shines a torch through the bushes. Maras? Hillbillies? The machetes are brandished at the front and rear of the wagon. "If they climb up here, you have to kick them down," comes the message. "It's them or us."

Down by the wheels, Said kicks people away as they try to scramble on board. Then the train picks up speed, leaving those disembodied voices behind. Now there are just the branches and rain to contend with, and the staggering side-to-side movement that threatens to unseat and hurl you under the wheels. As for the roar of the train - like a monster from a horror film - it doesn't kill, but you know why this is called "the beast". There are, though, moments of calm - "Aren't the stars beautiful tonight?" asks Mitchell.

Said climbs on to the roof to make sure that everyone is all right. He sits down and lights a cigarette. "Some of us survive, some of us don't," he says. "Some of us die, some of us make it. Of this whole group here on this train right now, not all of us is gonna make it. Two, three of us is gonna make it.'

As the train travels further into swamplands, it sinks lower, clanking and struggling onwards. The sleepers are melting into the mud. Dawn is coming. Then the train goes backwards, shunting with almighty force. It stops - in the middle of a double rainbow, right in the centre of the arc. All around is a tropical paradise, full of mango trees and yellow birds. The men pee over the side. The locomotive has derailed. Luckily, the rest of the wagons have stayed on the tracks. The journey to Ixtapec, which can be done in nine hours, takes almost 24.

And that is Said and Eugenia's first night on the train. There are another 15 to come. When they reach the US, they get lost in the desert for seven days, running from border patrols and vigilantes. But they make it. They are now in Texas with Said Jr, preparing for Christmas. If Said gets caught, he will go to prison and then be deported again. He will also make his way back to the US again. "They ain't never gonna stop us," he says.