Editor's note: A version of this article was originally published in The State Journal-Register in Springfield, Ill., on Feb. 14, detailing the process used by an Elgin, Ill., team to replicate the Lincoln funeral train, which is visiting the Indiana Welcome Center in Hammond Wednesday through Sunday. The story is being republished by The Times with permission of The State Journal-Register. Fundraising efforts for a cross-country trip by rail fell short, but the train is now touring the nation via semitrailer.
ELGIN, Ill. | Dave Kloke likes to play with trains. Not the Lionel or American Flyer variety, but full-size steam locomotives and cars that he builds himself.
Kloke, a master mechanic, and about a dozen dedicated volunteers are building a replica of the train car that carried the bodies of Abraham Lincoln and his son, Willie, from Washington to Springfield in 1865.
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"I like building big projects," he said.
The 2015 Lincoln Funeral Train Coalition (not to be confused with the local organization, the 2015 Lincoln Funeral Coalition) intends to have the completed car on display in Springfield the first weekend in May as part of the re-enactment of Lincoln's funeral that is being organized by the local funeral coalition.
Kloke is using photographs of the car's exterior, a description of the car and its furnishings in a 71-page pamphlet written for the Alexandria, Virginia, archaeology museum in 1996, and the work of a University of Arizona chemist to help guide his work.
"Our part of the show is to bring it in (to Springfield) under steam if at all possible," said Bob Wonderling, a retired state Department of Nuclear Safety employee who is senior project manager. "If not, we will put it in a parking lot. This is going to work. Absolutely no doubt about it."
"He's probably one of the only locomotive builders left in the country, and he's so good at it," Wonderling said of Kloke.
"It is exquisite," said Katie Spindell, co-chairman of the Springfield-based 2015 Lincoln Funeral Coalition. "I truly cannot imagine anyone with that kind of expertise. It is just phenomenal."
The original plan was to get track rights to bring the car to the Springfield Amtrak station on May 2. It would have been pulled by the Leviathan, a full-scale steam locomotive Kloke built several years ago that is being stored in a friend's roundhouse in Sugar Creek, Ohio. The Leviathan is a sister engine to the Jupiter, one of two engines that met on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit in Utah as the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads joined their rails to form the first Transcontinental Railroad.
The engine also can be moved onto a special semi for transport.
20 engines
Kloke, a Lincoln buff, built his first engine, the Leviathan, for himself. He then was commissioned by a private individual to build a second engine, the sister engine to the No. 119, the second of the two engines that met at Promontory. That engine is in York, Pa.
Although there is no roster of the engines that pulled the funeral car in 1865, Kloke said there were at least 20.
"We're pretty confident that an engine like the Leviathan was hooked to it at one point," he said. "It is a Schenectady engine. They were common, and they were pretty much the same in 1869 as they were in 1865."
Kloke said he and others were talking about Lincoln's funeral train about six years ago, and he decided to build a replica. He started first on the generals' car, one of nine cars making up the train.
Eight of the cars were provided by the chief railways over which the remains were transported; the ninth was the president's car, which had been built for use by the president and his Cabinet while he was still living and contained a parlor, sitting room and sleeping apartment.
The unfinished generals' car sits outside the Elgin shop where the funeral car is being reconstructed.
"We didn't have the money for it, so we elected to just finish the one (the funeral car) for sure," Kloke said.
The car is being built to Federal Railroad Administration specifications so it could be used on tracks. The car-truck — the wheeled apparatus supporting the car — is made of steel, although Kloke said the original would have been pieces of wood bolted together. The car has sixteen 33-inch wheels, twice as many as a normal railroad car of the day.
"They were experimenting with a lot of things they did differently with this car," Kloke said. "We're reproducing it as closely as we can."
He said he doesn't know how much the car, built in Alexandria as a "filler job" during the Civil War, originally cost.
"Nobody even knows for sure who ordered it," he said. "They think it was (Lincoln's Secretary of War Edwin) Stanton, but no one is certain."
Lincoln never rode in the car while he was alive, although he had an appointment for April 16, the day after he was assassinated, to look it over, Kloke said.
"He thought it was too fancy," Kloke said.
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Jerry Mennenga is the head carpenter and is did most of the woodwork. Mennenga, a retired industrial arts teacher from Iowa, came in during the week to work on the 48-foot-long, 13-foot-high car and goes home on the weekends.
Oak, walnut and poplar trim are the woods of choice. Mennenga "knows a lot about railroad practice and what they would have done," Wonderling said. That explains the presence of a toilet for use by the honor guard in the casket room that was sketched out of engravings of the day.
Kloke also "got a great price" to have someone re-create three brass chandeliers shown in interior sketches at the time.
The upholstery on the walls inside the car is hunter green, and the curtains will be a lighter green, said Linda Pesch, Kloke's girlfriend and a volunteer working on that part of the project. She said three or four different colors will be used in all.
Pesch is responsible for mounting a photograph of Lincoln in the shop where the funeral car is being assembled.
"I had to have him out there," she said. "I felt he needs to be in the building with us."
Ainsley Wonderling, Bob's wife and another volunteer, said that Family Heirloom Weavers of Red Lion, Pennsylvania, is producing the carpeting for the car.
"They are the same people who did the carpeting for the Lincoln Home in Springfield," said Ainsley, who has been collecting Civil War-era dresses for 30 years.
A man from Atlanta loaned the coalition two whale-oil lanterns that he said hung outside the back of the funeral car. They would have been used like flashlights to help the soldiers get on and off in the dark.
"We think they were on the car," Kloke said. "The guy's got pretty good documentation. He got them from Pullman, and Pullman supposedly got them from someone who knew they were on the car."
'Enthused' response
Ainsley Wonderling spotted three chairs on Craigslist that matched chairs shown in an engraving of the car's interior. She contacted the woman in South Bend, Indiana, and told her what she wanted them for.
"She told me the chairs came from her great-great-grandfather's plantation in Alabama," Ainsley said. The woman felt it would be cathartic to have the chairs in the funeral car, so she donated them to the project.
"People get so enthused about this," Ainsley said.
Bob Wonderling said Wayne Wesolowski, a chemistry professor at the University of Arizona, is the group's technical adviser.
Wesolowski built a 15-foot model of the funeral train over a 4 1/2-year period.
While at Benedictine University in Lisle in the mid-1990s, he was director of the Lincoln Train project and built the train model as part of that effort.
He's responsible for determining the exterior color of the original car, which was undocumented by any color photographs or paintings and was the subject of contradictory written accounts. Not only that, but what colors were called in 1865 doesn't necessarily match what they are called today.
He found a man in Minnesota who had inherited part of a window frame from the car that had been out for repairs when it burned in 1911.
Wesolowski analyzed microscopic flecks of paint from the trim and compared them with color standards of the period. He determined the color to be reddish-brown, or "dark maroon."
'Quite a spectacle'
After the May funeral re-enactment visit, the train will be available to make paid appearances in various cities and towns around the country.
"I need to recoup my money out of it," Kloke said.
Ainsley Wonderling calls the northern Illinois volunteers "the hardest-working people I have ever seen."
She also anticipates many re-enactors from that area will be in Springfield the first weekend in May.
"Not a lot have signed up yet, but they will be there," she said. "Most of them will camp, and they won't need hotels. They'll all jump in at the last minute."
"It will be quite a spectacle," she added.
"These re-enactors have been playing battles for years. Chickamauga, Vicksburg, Gettysburg. … But they've never been in a funeral before. And the train … it's a different element this time."
Original funeral car burned in 1911
The original railroad car that transported Abraham Lincoln's body from Washington to Springfield met the same fate as the original hearse that took him to Oak Ridge Cemetery. Both were consumed by flames.
After the May 4, 1865, funeral, the car, which had been built in Alexandria, Virginia, and named the United States, was sold by the government to the Union Pacific Railroad and was used as an executive car for several years.
It then was sold to the Colorado Central Railroad, stripped down and used as a day coach and eventually a work car.
Thomas Lowry, president of the Twin City Rapid Transit Co. in Minnesota, realized its significance and bought and restored the car in 1905.
After Lowry's death, the Minnesota Federation of Women's Clubs inherited the car.
The federation had plans to move the car to a secure exhibit space when on March 11, 1911, a prairie fire near Columbia Heights, Minnesota, destroyed the car, which was sitting idle.