Not really. I pretty much knew my way around train yards. A couple times, I walked into a yard office, and right back to the crew room and took a shower. No one said anything. Maybe they thought I was a crew. Back in the day, crews were not put up in hotels. They slept in their assigned caboose, or the crew room, which had several bunks and a shower. And made a return trip the next day. Things were just much different back in the 60s.
When I worked at Pontiac for the GTW, we had people roaming through the yard all the time. They brought buckets, and scooped up spilled grain for their animals, and spilled coal. Nobody cared. Grain was shipped in boxcars with plywood and cardboard grain doors. Some of the older cars had holes in the floor, and there would be a pile of grain where the car sat a while. This was all before the lawsuits and lawyers got started. When the locals returned to the yard, the railroaders were all over them, scavenging lumber that was used to brace a load, or broken pallets of bricks that the customers left in the car. There was plenty of good bracing lumber left in the cars, with only a few nails left in it. At Pontiac, we had a cleaning track, where anything left in the cars was pulled out and burned. So anything left in the cars was free for the taking. That's just how it was.
I've watched the train riding videos, but it would be really difficult today, with all the cameras, and train crews calling the police. And you just don't see many open box cars anymore. And riding an open intermodel car, or the end of a covered hopper doesn't look like much fun. Especially if the weather is bad.
Sorry bout the blurry pics. That's how those old snapshot cameras were. Those pics were taken southbound on the old Gulf, Mobile and Ohio, somewhere around Jackson, Tennessee.
"Ask your doctor if medical advice from a TV commercial is right for you".