A boxcar is a type of railroad freight car with a completely enclosed, box-shaped design and sliding doors on the sides. Picture a large rectangular container on wheels, tall enough to stand up inside and long enough to hold furniture, machinery, or stacks of cargo. Boxcars protect their contents from weather and theft as trains carry them across the country.

Before trucking became common in the mid-1900s, boxcars were the main way to ship manufactured goods long distances. A factory in Detroit might load boxcars with car parts bound for California, while farmers in Kansas filled them with wheat headed to East Coast cities. Railroad workers would connect dozens of boxcars together into long freight trains, sometimes over a mile long.

The classic boxcar is roughly 50 feet long, painted in railroad company colors, and marked with identification numbers. Modern freight trains still use boxcars, though many goods now travel in containers that can move easily between ships, trains, and trucks. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, people without homes or jobs sometimes illegally rode inside empty boxcars as they searched for work, jumping on and off at railroad yards, which was dangerous and occasionally appears in stories and folk songs from that era.