At the end of the American Civil War, the President, Abraham Lincoln, was assinated by a southern extremist.  Lincoln's funeral train departed on April 21, 1865, and it carried his coffin back from Washington to his home in Springfield, Illinois, mostly retracing the route that he had followed when he was first elected four years earlier.

Coming as it did after the surrender of the main southern army, Lincoln's funeral procession served as a coda to the war.  In every city it passed through, business came to a halt, as citizens draped their towns in black and observed a day of mourning.  The procession also prompted one of America's best known poems, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd by Walt Whitman.

The emperor of Manchuko (the "Last Emperor") visited Japan. It was customary to travel by sea to Yokohama, and to take a special train to Tokyo Station. The special arrangement was that the Japanese emperor himself was to greet the Manchuko emperor on the platform. A red carpet was set where the emperor's carriage door would stop, amid their national anthem would be being played by an army band on the platform. A very nice arrangement.

Now, a very experienced loco operator was chosen for the job and told to do two things at once, (i) the train must stop exactly where the emperor's door would be at the red carpet spot, and (ii) the train must stop when there would be 30 seconds of the national anthem still left to be played.  Back then, this sort of order was absolute; no excuse.

He made it. He stopped the train exactly where and when he was told to, and fell unconscious on the loco floor. (I wonder the same thing is still happening in North Korea today.)

I will become a patissier, God willing.

There might be picture around on the net, but Kim Il Sung of North Korea made a pretty high profil trip to Moscow - by train, in his own railcar one or two years ago. I think it was one of his first trips outside his country.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes