Is it worth it to try and shamble towards pegton or should i head towards the nearest revive point?
If you were closer I would say shamble over and look for a revive and heal here since that way you wouldn't have to worry about zombies along the way, but you are pretty far and survivors move twice as fast as zombies (at least at low levels.) So I would say look for a revive and heal now, run toward Pegton as fast as you can, and if you are killed again along the way then shamble the rest of the way.
Is it possible to trade items with other survivors? I'm just thinking that as a fireman, I won't have much use for a bunch of pistols and ammo, so if I find any in a search, it could probably be used better by someone else.
No it is not possible to trade. People often wish they could, but the obvious reason that isn't allowed is to prevent people from having an alt do all the searching and then simply hand the good stuff to their main character.
Also, if you find pistols and ammo keep them. Even if you have no use for them now, you'll eventually want them and keeping them will save you the searching later. It's not like you need the room in your inventory for anything else.
What other ways are there to get XP? As a cop, the best I've been doing is shooting at stray zombies.
That's pretty much the best way for a cop to gain XP. One of the downsides of UD is that it takes so long for a beginning player to get up to speed. It would be nice if there were an easier beginners area where you could gain your first couple levels before being released into the more difficult wider city, but oh well. Once you gain several levels (and more to the point, gain the most useful skills) XP becomes a pretty minor concern because you'll get XP incidentally as you just go about doing survivor stuff like healing people and clearing zombies out of breached buildings.
It's too bad you don't gain XP for building barricades, since building barricades is one of if not the main activity of survivors, but then if you got XP for building barricades you'd probably gain XP too quickly for game balance. By the time you're building barricades you don't really need XP anymore.
Also, another good tip for everyone: always carry around at least one FAK (first aid kit.) That's so that you can heal your own infection in you get bitten. Getting infected is pretty common, and it sucks to have to move around to find healing while infected.