Obama-lama-ding-dong

President-elect Obama, the Devil incarnate, successor to the so-called “greatest president that ever was” (“Shuckins; I don’t know what his beef was. Ain’t it a shame the economy tanked on my watch?”), will take the train from Philadelphia to Washington D.C. for his inauguration.
Supposedly reprising a similar train-ride president-elect Lincoln took.

There are many differences, of course:
—1) For one thing, at that time many of the railroads that become the Northeast Corridor didn’t exist.
The railroad south out of Philadelphia was Pennsy precursor Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore. (You can still find PW&B initials on the Port Deposit station.)
In Baltimore, passengers had to transload to the Baltimore & Ohio. Although by then, through cars to Washington D.C. were horsed through city streets to the B&O.
And at that time, the original PW&B out of Philadelphia was probably the line hard by the Delaware River, a line that flooded occasionally, so that line was later replaced.
PW&B rebuilt the line further inland, which became the Pennsy and later the Corridor. —The original line was sold to Reading (“RED-ing,” not “REED-ing”) and became their Chester branch.
—2) The greatest difference is that Mr. Lincoln had to make his train-ride in secret.
He had to ride a night-train to be invisible.
Secessionist sentiment was strong in Baltimore, and there was threat of assassination.
PW&B management counseled against his riding through Baltimore to the B&O in an open carriage.
—3) Then too, train-travel was the primary means of transit over distance.
So of course Lincoln took the train.
Obama could have taken I-95 or a jet.

I worry about assassination of Obama too.
There certainly are enough hot-headed honkies around.
I have this fear we’re looking at a Biden presidency.

My siblings are all tub-thumping Conservative Christians, and therefore REPUBLICANS, and consider Barack Obama to be “the Devil incarnate.” Current president George W. Bush is “the greatest president ever.”

“Pennsy” is the Pennsylvania Railroad, no longer in existence. It merged with New York Central Railroad in 1968 as Penn-Central, and that tanked in about eight years. “Pennsy” was once the largest railroad in the world. —Pennsy had a mainline from New York City to Washington D.C. which they electrified, and it became Amtrak’s “Northeast Corridor;” although the Corridor has been extended to Boston over the old New York, New Haven & Hartford line. (“Amtrak” is a government corporation promulgated in 1970 to take over nationwide rail passenger service. It mainly runs passenger trains over the independent railroads with its own equipment, but it it also owns and operates its own railroads; e.g. the old Pennsy electrified line from New York City to Washington D.C., the so-called “Northeast Corridor.”)

“Port Deposit,” MD is a small town on the northern bank of the Susquehanna River, not far from where it empties into Chesapeake Bay. The railroad runs through it onto a bridge over the river.

Pennsy (precursor PB&W) did not originally run through Baltimore to Washington D.C. —That Pennsy line was built later, with heavy resistance from Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, which originally was the only main railroad from the north serving Washington.

The “Delaware River” is Pennsylvania’s eastern border, and used to flood. But not any more — flood control.