Lincoln's Private Rail Car

The private rail car provided for President Abraham Lincoln, photographed in January 1865 in Alexandria, Virginia by Andrew J. Russell.

The car was reported to be the most opulent private car of its day. Yet it would only play a tragic role: Lincoln never used the car while alive, but it would carry his body in his funeral train.

The passing of the train carrying the body of the murdered president became the focal point of national mourning. The world had never seen anything like it.

Indeed, the remarkable expressions of grief which took place across the nation for nearly two weeks would not have been possible without steam locomotives pulling the funeral train from city to city.

A biography of Lincoln by Noah Brooks published in the 1880s recalled the scene:

The funeral train left Washington on the 21st of April, and traversed nearly the same route that had been passed over by the train that bore him, President-elect, from Springfield to Washington five years before.

It was a funeral unique, wonderful. Nearly two thousand miles were traversed; the people lined the entire distance, almost without an interval, standing with uncovered heads, mute with grief, as the sombre cortege swept by.

Even night and falling showers did not keep them away from the line of the sad procession.

Watch-fires blazed along the route in the darkness, and by day every device that could lend picturesqueness to the mournful scene and express the woe of the people was employed.

In some of the larger cities the coffin of the illustrious dead was lifted from the funeral train and carried through, from one end to the other, attended by mighty processions of citizens, forming a funeral pageant of proportions so magnificent and imposing that the world has never since seen the like.

Thus, honored in his funeral, guarded to his grave by famed and battle-scarred generals of the army, Lincoln's body was laid to rest at last near his old home. Friends, neighbors, men who had known and loved homely and kindly honest Abe Lincoln, assembled to pay their final tribute.