BEFORE THERE WAS AIR FORCE One, there was The United States, a luxury steam locomotive built in the waning days of the Civil War. But its first and only official use came after the death of the president for whom it was built: Abraham Lincoln actually never even set eyes on the train. Instead it became best known as the vehicle that took Lincoln's coffin from Washington to Springfield, Illinois.
The train's very strange history has an even stranger modern chapter. It is, somehow, back up and running.
The U.S. Military Railroad, a sort of predecessor of the U.S. Army Transportation Corps, began constructing The United States in 1863, sensing the coming end of the war. The department predicted, correctly, that the president would need a vehicle to travel around the country after his presidency returned to some semblance of normalcy. “Lincoln was aware of the construction but really shelled the idea anytime it came up,” says Shannon Brown, media director for the modern-day Lincoln Funeral Train. “He felt that there was no reason to be spending money on something like that.” Lincoln kept putting off seeing the train, even after it was finished, in 1865.
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