Lionel 6-11183 Lincoln Funeral Train

By April 1865, the Union had prevailed over the Confederacy, and the Iron Horse connected towns and cities across the nation and its territories. The Nashville, a 4-4-0 American-type locomotive built by the Cuyahoga Steam Furnace Company during the 1850s, was a stalwart on the Cleveland, Columbus & Cincinnati Railroad. Back in Virginia, the United States was being built by the US Military Railroad as the first presidential car. Ordered in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln was famously scheduled to ride in the car for the first time on April 15, 1865. But the tragedy of April 14 kept Lincoln from that appointment and forever changed American history. After Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton took charge of arranging Lincoln’s funeral, and for the body to be transported back to Springfield, Illinois. Though Mary Todd Lincoln, the president’s widow, was insisting on a simple and direct burial, Stanton’s plan evolved into a national journey involving numerous elaborate ceremonies. On April 21, the remains of the president and his son Willie, who had died in 1863, were placed in the United States for a journey that roughly retraced the inaugural train trip four year earlier. Of the approximately 20 different locomotives that would carry the father and son home over 1600 miles of track, the Nashville, which pulled the funeral consist over the CC&C’s rails in Ohio, would become the most famous. With the assistance of Wayne Wesolowski, Retired Director of the Benedictine University Lincoln Train Project, Lionel now offers this important train  with full mourning decoration in 1:48 scale as part of the Heritage Series of 19th century steam locomotives.