Terrifying Photos of Train Surfers and Turbine Climbers
June 19, 2024Dominating the skyline of downtown Warsaw is the Varso tower, a 53-story, 310-meter-high office block that is the tallest building not just in Poland but the entire European Union. On top of its roof is a spire that juts into the air – and just a few footsteps from the very tip of that spire is Jake Barnes, a twenty-something British guy who risks his life like this in order to save his life.
He is looking down at all beneath him and freaking out a little. His mates are asking him to stand on top of the 80-meter spire for a drone video when he starts to lose it. “I think about how I should’ve done it all the time,” he tells me. “But there was condensation on the top of the spire, and it was very slippery. I had a panic attack.”
In fairness, I say to him, I would not want to find myself having a panic attack anywhere, let alone while clambering up a greasy metal pole 310-meters above the Warsaw pavement. But this is Barnes’s world, and he’s done enough hair-raising stunts to blow your balls off.
Now aged 27, Barnes is a successful urban-exploring photographer from the UK. Yet life hasn’t always been so fulfilling. He was deported from Australia in 2019, and his grandad – the closest thing he’d ever had to a father figure – passed away from pancreatic cancer weeks later. COVID hit not long after that, and for Barnes, severe depression and substance abuse set in.
“It saved my life," he says of urbex. "I was just drinking myself to death, really – I wanted to die. I didn’t see the purpose anymore. And then I found urban exploring and it just gave me purpose. It helped me overcome anxiety, severe depression, suicidal thoughts. It's a beautiful thing.”
He first picked up a camera while working as a tradie in Australia in 2018. But it wasn't until a fellow college student told him about "rooftopping" that everything changed. One night, the two of them scaled a local high-rise building and Barnes fell in love with the adrenaline.
It was an easy job: Barnes and his mate simply yanked open the exit door into the building: “A lot of doors in England just have magnets,” Barnes laughs. They walked through the lobby and into the elevator, and spent 15 minutes mucking about on the roof before making their exit. He did, however, get arrested that same evening – the UK, it turns out, is less hospitable to trespassers than most of the continent, so Barnes now favors European urbex adventures.
“Urbex in England's not really worth the risk, because they will try to fuck you through the law,” he says. “I got arrested on suspicion of burglary, and all I did was open a door and go on the roof with a camera. They put me and my friend in a cell for 18 hours.”
Currently hunkering down in Europe while he awaits his Australian visa renewal, Barnes continues to catalog his exploits on social media (his main Instagram is currently suspended: his back up is here). His work may help you answer the question: What does it look and feel like to surf on the roof of a speeding train? What would happen if you woke up one day and decided to climb to the top of a 140-meter-tall wind turbine? His adventures have seen him scale skyscrapers and stadiums, and scurry about in metro, drain, and sewer tunnels. There are occasionally “loads of rats,” Barnes says. The dream for him is New York, and its many rooftops.
“When I'm train surfing I have a mission, and that's to make sure I'm getting the best pictures possible,” Barnes says. “It is risky, but it feels nice – like a mixture of cocaine and LSD. When you come up from something, [it’s] that feeling, but constant. It's better than shagging, almost.”
A fair bit of reconnaissance goes into train surfing, it turns out. “You have to know when it's coming, what model’s coming. And unless you're an idiot, you’ll have checked the route, [to see] if there's any bridges, if there are any bits of metal sticking out. If there’s any police, train conductors, if there's any security.”
As for this work, he’s recently published the zines 96 Hours in Berlin and 48 Hours in Paris, for which he and a few buddies crammed in as much trespassing as humanly possible. Another, Into the Abyss, depicts his descents into Britain’s Victorian drainage network. He’s shown his work internationally and he’s working on a book documenting his train-surfing across Europe.
“One day, I’d like to be considered the best analog photographer in urbex,” he says.
Why not just shoot on digital, though? “I understand the convenience of it, because sometimes you only have 10 minutes on rooftops, tops, and in low-light conditions. With a digital camera, it's way easier. With analog, there's different types of film, different speeds of film, you have to know what the fuck you're doing, and it can be quite stressful,” Barnes says.
“But a lot of people want to meet up with me now because of my analog photography. They like my style, they know I don't fuck about – I want everything to be perfect.”
More than anything, urbex has given Barnes community, and a reason to live: “I’ve met some of the most loyal friends I'll ever meet through urban exploring. Sometimes you’ve only just met a person, and then all of a sudden you're surfing a speeding train with them. After that, they're your friend for life. That's an experience that you'll never have with anyone else.”
