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Bush Funeral Train
NAVASOTA, TEXAS – DECEMBER 5: A sign reads, "President George HW Bush thanks you for a lifetime of service," as he is hanging from a building next to the railroad tracks where he's waiting. Union Pacific No. 4141 will carry the coffin of President George HW Bush on December 05, 2018 in Navasota, Texas. The train will take the former president to his last resting place, at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas.
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On Thursday, a 4,300-horsepower locomotive will carry Mr. Bush's coffin, along with his relatives and close friends, for a distance of about 113 kilometers. Crossing five small Texas cities is expected to last about two and a half hours and bring the coffin from suburban Houston to College Station. According to Bush spokesman Jim McGrath, the funeral train has been part of the official planning of his funeral for years.
A procession will drive Bush to his presidential library of the university, where he will be buried at a private ceremony next to his wife Barbara, who died in April, and his daughter Robin, who died at the university. age 3 years in 1953..
This is the eighth funeral train in US history, and the first since Dwight D. Eisenhower's body left the Washington National Cathedral in seven US states to travel to his hometown of Abilene, in the United States. Kansas, 49 years ago. The funeral train of Abraham Lincoln was the first, in 1865.
The sixth car on the train, a converted luggage truck called "Council Bluffs", has transparent sides to allow the mourners to follow the journey on Thursday from the coffin draped with the Bush flag.
"We have always taken the railroads, and I have never forgotten it," Bush said at the time, remembering having taken the train and often slept on it during trips as a child with his family.
