It is the eighth funeral train in U. S. history and the first since Dwight D. Eisenhower’s body traveled from the National Cathedral in Washington through seven states to his Kansas hometown of Abilene 49 years ago. Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train was the first, in 1865.
SPRING, Texas — The locomotive was painted to resemble Air Force One, but George H. W. Bush joked that if it had been around during his presidency, he may have preferred to ride the rails rather than take to the skies.
“I might have left Air Force One behind,” Bush quipped during the 2005 unveiling of 4141, a blue and gray locomotive commissioned in honor of the 41st president and unveiled at Texas A&M University.
On Thursday, that same 4,300-horsepower machine left a suburban Houston railyard loaded with Bush’s casket for his final journey after almost a week of ceremonies in Washington and Texas. The train then embarked on a slow roll to his presidential library in College Station, passing thousands of people who stood along the tracks. Many of them held up their phones for pictures and watched from highway overpasses.
One of the first small towns to greet the train was Pinehurst, where Andy Gordon, took his 6-year-old daughter, Addison, out of school so she and her 3-year-old sister, Ashtyn, could witness the moment firsthand.
“Hopefully, my children will remember the significance and the meaning of today,” said Gordon, 38. In Addison’s hand were two small American flags.
At one point, state troopers hovering in a helicopter ordered people to get off the tracks as the train approached.
Once the train arrives in College Station, Bush will be laid to rest at a private ceremony next to his wife, Barbara, who died in April, and his daughter Robin, who died at age 3 in 1953.
