Barack Obama opened four days of inaugural celebration in a bunting-bedecked presidential train Saturday, rolling from Philadelphia to Washington along a bitterly cold route swarming with well-wishers.
Pulled by an engine called Locomotive 44 (pure coincidence, according to the soon-to-be 44th president’s team), the train picked up Vice President-elect Joe Biden in Wilmington, stopped briefly in Baltimore, then finally rolled into the capital in the winter darkness.
Well-wishers waved from abandoned lots in gritty neighborhoods and from docks on Chesapeake Bay, braving the cold sometimes for hours.
At least twice, Obama stepped onto the open rear platform of his 1939 vintage train car to wave back.
But the day-long inaugural spectacle was a constant tug between celebration and seriousness.
The train followed the same historic route Abraham Lincoln took into the capital in 1861, the backdrop for a carefully staged effort to call on past struggles to inspire a nation in crisis.
“We are here to mark the beginning of our journey to Washington. This is fitting, because it was here in this city that our American journey began,” Obama told a crowd in Philadelphia, after being introduced by Pat Stiles, a 57-year-old mother of two from Parker.
“The problems we face are very different now, but they are severe in their own right. Only a handful of times in our history has a generation been confronted with challenges so vast,” said Obama, who riffed throughout the day on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, dropping Lincoln-esque phrases into his speeches.
In Wilmington, the tone shifted to something more reminiscent of the campaign he’d just completed.
Obama praised the grit of his vice president-elect, playing to Biden’s hometown crowd by retelling much of Biden’s life story, including the death of his first wife.
“We will fight for you every single day that we are in Washington,” Obama told the overcoat-wrapped crowd, “because Joe and I are committed to leading a government that is accountable, not just to the wealthy and well-connected but to you.”
The landscape of the 137-mile trip has dramatically changed since Lincoln’s day. The train rolled from wooded suburbs of Delaware and Maryland through some of the country’s most blighted urban neighborhoods on the outskirts of Baltimore.
“We will be called to show patience even as we act with fierce urgency. And we should never forget we are the heirs of those early patriots, men and women who refused to give up when it all seemed so improbable,” Obama told a crowd in front of Baltimore City Hall. “That’s the spirit we must reclaim today.”
But if Obama went out of his way to remind supporters of the seriousness of the moment, that wasn’t the mood of many who stood in the cold to listen.
“The sky’s the limit for my son now,” said Damien Wainwright, an Army recruiter from North Carolina who drove 6 1/2 hours to Baltimore on Friday to see Obama speak.
“It was an opportunity to see my new commander in chief as he visits my old hometown, Baltimore City, with my wife and 9-year-old son. It makes it all worth it,” Wainwright said.
Standing nearby, Vermetta Whitfield said she flew in from Phoenix for the inauguration and decided to see part of the inaugural train as well. “If I can stand in the cold for a football game, I can certainly do it for this,” Whitfield said. “It was just awesome.”
It must have been a sentiment shared by the thousands of people who waited in the cold to see the inaugural train as it passed, waving from roadsides, train platforms or second-story windows.
On the outskirts of Washington, traffic was stopped for miles as drivers pulled their cars over for a potential glimpse of the new president. Supporters could be seen along the route in freezing temperatures even well after dark.
For Stiles, who was one of 16 Americans from across the country picked to accompany the president-elect on the trip, it was the moment of a lifetime. After she introduced Obama in Philadelphia, she and her husband rode in a train car reserved for invited guests and followed the presidential motorcade to each of the events.
“I can’t sleep. I don’t want to miss a moment of this,” Stiles said. “I’m thankful that our kids get to live in the world Barack Obama will lead us into. We lost our way for a while.”
