| From 6 through 9 October 1964, less than one month before the presidential election between President Lyndon B. Johnson and Senator Barry Goldwater, the president’s wife Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson rode on a 19-car campaign train from Washington D.C. to New Orleans via Jacksonville. I managed to see the train, quite by accident, on its way into New Orleans at Canal Blvd. and had no idea what it was until I saw the red-white-and-blue observation car lettered LADY BIRD SPECIAL. I wasn’t much of a railroad photographer back then, and it was dark when I saw it; but Phillip Kotheimer shot the train earlier that afternoon in Mobile, while its three E-units were being refueled from a tank truck just south of the station. |