Some Goodies People Missed About The Obama Inaugural Train

[Vogon_Glory]

I found some interesting facts about the Obama Inaugural Special which most of the media didn't bother to notice.

The numbers of the Amtrak diesel locomotives that pulled the special were significant: one was Amtrak no. 44 (Barack Obama will be the 44th President of the USA) and Amtrak no. 120 (January 20th is Inauguration Day),

The description of the end car as a "caboose" is flat-out WRONG. Cabooses (Or cabin cars or guards vans) are four-axle cars with very spartan accommodations usually attached to freight trains. Most cabooses accommodated train crews, not passengers. Most cabooses disappeared from US freight trains in the 1980s as railroad freight crew sizes shrank and as they were replaced with electronic monitoring devices placed in the end-car's coupler knuckle.

President-elect Obama and his family rode to Washington, DC in what is usually called a private car or office car. These were nearly self-contained rail cars containing cooking, sleeping and living accommodations for their wealthy or powerful owners and the staff that cared for their passengers (Think of it as a circa-1900 equivalent of a Lear Jet). The car President-elect Obama rode in was reportedly built in 1939; it is now owned by a man in Florida.

One other fact: the car the Obamas rode in had previously hosted former president George HW Bush and former president William Jefferson Clinton.

:patriot:

[Captain Hilts]

1. Sometimes, FDR's private car would be hooked onto the end of a regular train...

and FDR's engineer would drive. It also rarely went over 35 mph as FDR did not have the back muscles to protect himself from the train's movement at that speed for long.

One time on one of these trains Eleanor - who had to run off energy - was prowling the train and ran into her brother in one of the other cars.

The Ferdinand Magellan - sister car the Marco Polo sits in DC's Union station these days - was made by the Pullman company around '40 and was specially armoured with hatches in the floor in the event it fell off a bridge.