The President and the Railroads
The first President of the United States to ride on a railroad was Andrew Jackson, when he traveled from Washington DC to Baltimore, Maryland in June 1833. For the next one hundred years, the primary means of Presidential travel was by the railroads, and the railroads were pleased to try to accommodate the men who occupied the Executive Mansion. Those hoping to acquire the office began to use the railroads to campaign, recognizing the ability to reach more voters and deliver their message to them in a shorter time. The first to campaign for office using the railroad was William Henry Harrison in 1836. He lost that election but when he won in 1840 he used the railroad to travel to his inauguration, another first.
By the time of the Lincoln Administration, Presidential rail travel was becoming more common. Lincoln was both a political supporter of the railroads and a former railroad attorney. He traveled by train several times while in office, including to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to deliver a speech in 1863. Some believe he wrote the speech on the train. Certainly, he worked on it. During Lincoln’s Presidency, a private car was ordered and built for him, named the United States. Lincoln was concerned that the private car, an affectation associated with the wealthy, was the wrong signal to send to the American public while the nation was embroiled in the Civil War. He only rode in it once, when it took him home to Springfield after his assassination in 1865, the first American President to be assassinated in office.
Several succeeding presidents used this and succeeding private cars, some of them provided by railroads eager to develop stronger business ties with the United States government. James Garfield was entering the waiting room of Washington’s Sixth Street Station to board a train when he was shot by Charles Guiteau. Ironically, one of the President’s companions was Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln. Garfield had been planning to travel by train to a vacation in New Jersey. He would eventually get the train ride, after months of inept doctoring in Washington he traveled to Elberon, on the Jersey Shore, where he died in September 1881, the first President to die before reaching the age of fifty.
FDR was the first President to have his private railcar designated, by the Secret Service, with the numeral 1 in the later manner of Air Force One, or Marine One. Officially designated Car 1, it was more commonly referred to by the name given by the Pullman Company when it was built, the Ferdinand Magellan. After the government bought the car and sent it to Pullman for modifications to accommodate the President it made extensive security modifications and when they were finished Ferdinand Magellan was the heaviest railcar ever built in the United States.
FDR loved Car 1 for many reasons, one of which being that when the train pulled into a station for a planned appearance – a whistle-stop – he could step onto the back platform of Ferdinand Magellan supported by an aide, and his wheelchair never made an appearance. Roosevelt would remain standing as the train pulled out of the station, supporting himself on the platform rail with one hand and waving with the other, a bit of Presidential subterfuge concealing the fact that he was in fact largely confined to a wheelchair, the first President to suffer from such a disability. Roosevelt, as had been Lincoln, was carried to his grave in his private railcar.