Late last year, Italian photographer Marco Casino travelled to South Africa to film this short documentary, Staff Riders, about teenagers near Johannesburg who perform an activity they call staff riding. It involves scraping their feet along the ground as their cling to the outside of a train with just their hands.
Train surfing, Casino says, is a popular sport among the country's poor teengers, and is a distraction from the potent mix of desperation and boredom. And they certainly do seem to be having fun as they saunter on top of train carriages, ducking every few seconds to avoid passing poles. Many lose their limbs – and lives – in the bargain.
Casino's work was included in Birmingham’s NEC festival in March and won first place in the Online Short category at the 2014 World Press Photo Multimedia Contest.
While the rest of the world has reacted to staff riding with horror to this documentary, Mumbai can scarcely understand what the fuss is about. For years, daredevils in the city have performed similar stunts on local trains – and faced the same disastrous consequences.
Mumbai's stunt riders came to public attention when this video was posted to YouTube in 2011, showing them swaying casually from a Harbour Line train. The two teenagers behave as if they have never heard of gravity, swinging by their fingertips from the frame of the train to slap passing poles.
After the video went viral in September 2011, the Railway Police began a sustained campaign to thwart aspiring stunt artists. They arrested over 100 teenagers in just five days , and summoned the parents of those who were minors.
That did little to stop the stunt riders. In 2013, a 14-year-old performing similar tricks while being surreptitiously filmed was struck by a pole and fell off the train. He did not survive. (The video is here; it is only for those with nerves of steel as you wait for the inevitable, tragic fall.)
However, thousands of other Mumbaikars routinely perform a less flamboyant version of train surfing every day because it is their only way to to work on time. At peak hour, scores of commuters cling to the outside of of each compartment because each nine-car train with a capacity of only 1,700 actually carries more than 4,500 passengers. On average, two passengers slip to their deaths every day or are killed because they fail to lean back to avoid being hit by electrical poles along their journey.
Some daredevils attempt to escape the congestion by riding atop the carriages, even though the high voltage in the overhead electricity lines means instant death for anyone in a two-metre radius of them. The Railway Police detained 1,904 commuters for rooftop travel in the first five months of 2012, the period for which figures are last available, up 36% from the corresponding period the previous year.
To bring down the casualties, railway authorities last month decided to remove the rudimentary ladders affixed to carriages to allow maintenance staff to inspect the compartment roofs. "We have decided to make use of a portable ladder in case of any emergency," a railway spokesman said.
According to the rules, a passenger "travelling dangerously" on a Mumbai local train can be fined Rs 500, or sent to prison for three months, or both.
