Trapped on the D.C. Train! (6 page)

Did you know?

Did you know that Andrew Jackson was the first president to travel by train? He rode twelve miles from Ellicott’s Mills, Maryland, to Baltimore in 1833.

President Abraham Lincoln took some very important train rides. One, in 1863, was from Washington, D.C., to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. There, he gave one of the most famous speeches of all time, the Gettysburg Address. But President Lincoln’s final train ride was very sad. He was assassinated in 1865. A train carried his coffin from Washington to his home in Springfield, Illinois. Along the way, it stopped at thirteen cities, where citizens paid their respects. Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower also had funeral trains many years later.

Warren G. Harding was the first president to visit Alaska, which was a territory when he took a train there in 1923. Alaska’s railroad was brand-new at the time. In Fairbanks, visitors can see the train car the president rode.

People still love to ride the train—even presidents! President Barack Obama took a train to his inauguration in 2009. A special car built in 1939 was hooked to the back end. People gathered near the tracks to wave to him as his train passed by.