It starts with a warm-up run along the station platform. Then, just as the train carriage peels away from the end, a train surfer jumps on to join his fellow commuters, bunched up beside the open train door.
He then squeezes out of a window and mounts the train's roof, spreading his legs slightly to keep balance. With outstretched arms, he ducks and dives in smooth balletic movements to avoid the overhead cables, pylons and bridges.
It's a spectacle. His friends and awestruck girls watch from the windows and doors, spurring him to even riskier moves.
Several boys have died horribly while surfing trains this way, the latest being a teenager whose decapitated body was found on top of a train at Midway Railway station in Soweto.
"We couldn't determine his age because he was headless," Joburg emergency services spokesperson Malcolm Midgely said.
Train surfers duck cables through which 3 000 volts of electricity is surging, so when they miss, they are electrified and their bodies left in a bloody, charred mess on top of the train or on the rails below, often in pieces.
By late last year, train surfing was out of control as a result of the strike by security guards and the problem hasn't been harnessed since.
From July last year to now, there have been 57 train-related tragedies reported to Joburg Emergency Services, and about half of these were victims of train surfing, said Midgely.
Those who get away with their lives are brutally maimed, some so badly they will survive only as amputees.
But now, with the intervention of the Rail Safety Partnership Programme initiated by the SA Rail Commuter Co-operation (SARCC) - which includes using reformed train surfers as ambassadors - there is much more awareness of the dangers, according to SARCC spokesperson Pule Mabe.
"It is far from being eliminated, but the message is gradually getting through via educational visits to schools and talks to teachers.
"We have marches planned to a number of schools in Soweto to communicate the do's and don'ts of rail safety," he said.
Like most deviant adolescent behaviour, train surfing is one symptom of much deeper socio-economic and domestic ills.
In the documentary Soweto Surfing - produced by Cinga Productions' Dimi Raphoto for Special Assignment last year - the lives of three youths for whom train surfing had become a regular activity are explored.
One is Prince Shiba, aka "Bitch Nigga", a name he's adopted from American rap songs by Tupac and 50 Cent, and he conducts his stunts dressed in black.
"Like in the movie Matrix," he grins.
Another is Lefa Mzimela, 16, from Orange Farm south of Joburg. His father left home for another woman when he was too young to remember and never paid child support.
During the making of the doccie, Lefa was taking the train as opposed to a taxi into the city just so he could surf, but would often bunk school with his friends to go drinking and play pool in bars.
Even more shocking was the fact that Lefa had modelled himself on "Bitch Nigga" and had gone a step further, mastering the art of surfing the train backwards - which meant calculating the distances between the cable poles and bridges.
He'd dubbed his surfing style "Viva la Rassa", in deference to the legendary style of Mexican-American wrestler Eddie Guerrero.
"The cable has to pass right near my face," he told the camera. "A young township boy wouldn't pull it off. He'd get hurt. I do it every day."
Their friend "Styles", meanwhile, had mastered the art of slipping underneath the train and holding onto the metal rods underneath.
"This is one of the most dangerous stunts," said Midgely. "They go over the top and then underneath, like a loop. Some of them have died by grabbing the overhead cables to get back onto the top. They don't know that these are live wires."
Train surfers are all male and typically aged between 15 and 23, so the need to impress girls and peer pressure to do an act of bravery are major factors.
But what emerges strongly from the documentary, too, is the lack of adult supervision and dearth of opportunity in the lives of these youngsters.
The three friends are almost glib about fatality. If Lefa died, Prince said, there's nothing he could do about it.
"A dead man is a dead man. Maybe I'd go to his funeral, maybe not, but I wouldn't lose sleep over it," he mused.
"You can only stop if you die or find a job," Lefa said. "Going back to the township and doing nothing sucks."
"We spoke to many of these young boys and found a lot of them don't have a family structure," says Mabe.
"They tend to be from either single-parent families, or they are the head of an orphaned family themselves."
Part of the rail safety campaign is - with the help of teachers - to look at the family dynamics of these boys and find ways to bridge the gap in support, discipline and supervision.
But the biggest thrust will be augmenting security on the trains and platforms - using metrorail guards, private security and the SAPS - and spreading awareness of the dangers of rail transport in general.
Still, where there's a will there's a way.
Midgely points out that the stations west of the city, especially between Langlaagte station and Midway station in Soweto, are in close proximity to one another, it's easy to hop on at one station and off at the next without being seen by the guards.
"That's where most of the trainsurfing happens. The problem is they choose stations where security is visibly inadequate."
Education and creating awareness, he hopes, will have a more profound effect in the long run.
No doubt that will entail showing the gruesome aftermath of when a show-off on top of a moving train gets it wrong.
After all, there can be few deaths more ghoulish than being decapitated by a high-voltage cable. And the accounts for reformed surfers will surely be sobering.
As Prince recalls in Soweto Surfing: "I saw a young boy I didn't recognise on top one day. He was facing the back of the train. We could see he was going to hit the cable. As it hit, he fell down. There was blood all over "