What a great thread and such wonderful pictures!
Thanks for sharing these with the forum.
Thank you! I'd been thinking about this thread for a while, and the second full week for the new forum section seemed like the perfect time and place to do it.
At one point, the owners of the car (
http://www.thosetrainpeople.com/) were talking about permanently displaying it somewhere in or around Springfield, Ill., home of the Lincoln Museum and Library, but this has not been worked out. It's currently displayed indoors in a RR museum in Duluth, MN.
Some people attending the Spencer event were slightly disappointed that the car and engine were not seen directly coupled together, but this actually never took place on the original funeral train. The special car was always on the rear of the train, and there were always several cars in between it and whatever locomotive happened to be up front at the time.
Every now and then, the previously discussed tourist train based at New Freedom, PA runs a special train that honors either the Lincoln funeral train or the Gettysburg Address train, both of which passed through Hanover Junction, shown below. I linked this shot from Pinterest, which is why it's slightly out of square. (If I took one like this myself, I wouldn't pick it for posting.)
The station / hotel has been cosmetically restored on the outside to its original appearance, and there is a small museum inside. The old line to Gettysburg turned to the left here, and the Lincoln funeral train took the right fork, on its way to Harrisburg. As far as I know, this is the only remaining notable structure that the two train routes had in common.
photograph of the dead President...
...the photo was taken in New York.
Interesting! That explains the light fixtures that don't match anything in the Capitol.
If you look around online for this pic, you're more likely to encounter the "enhanced" version that the NPS doesn't display at all. It's so sharp and detailed that it may better be described as a digital work of art based on a photograph, and that doesn't meet NPS standards for historical authenticity. There's no way the glass plate could have picked up so much detail from that distance, under low light conditions. We're lucky he got anything at all.