The Somber History of the Presidential Funeral Train
This grand tradition has allowed Americans across the country to pay their respects to the chief executive
The train carrying President George H. W. Bush, following in the tradition of Lincoln, Garfield and Eisenhower, will travel along a published 70-mile route so that mourners can gather along the way to witness the journey. (AP/Pat Sullivan)
By Bethanee Bemis , Sara Murphy
December 5, 2018
On Thursday, December 6, 2018, a locomotive painted in the colors of Air Force One and numbered 4141 will depart from Spring, Texas, carrying the remains of the 41st President George Herbert Walker Bush to his final resting place in College Station, 70 miles away. With this final journey, the Bush family reinstates a tradition that has not been seen since the funeral of Dwight Eisenhower almost 50 years ago. Union Pacific train number 4141 dates to October 18, 2005, when the locomotive was unveiled during a ceremony at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum on the Texas A&M University campus. Those that come out to line the route of Bush’s funeral train will not just be paying their respects to the nation’s 41st president, they will be practicing a time-honored democratic tradition of honoring public service.
In the era before airplanes and interstate highways, the train was a practical part of the burial proceedings, conveying a casket from one place to another. Following the deaths of presidents, like Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S Grant, James Garfield, William McKinley, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eisenhower, the funeral train’s journey from town to town also proved to be a visual emblem of sorrow and mourning, and a heartfelt way for the American people to honor the office of the president and its legacy.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/somber-history-presidential-funeral-train-180970955/
