Presidential campaign whistle-stop train tours punctuate Pennsylvania, U.S. political history

It’s back to Pennsylvania.

Joe Biden on Wednesday begins his post-debate campaign with a whistle-stop foray into Pennsylvania. The former vice president chose Pittsburgh to kick off his campaign in April 2019, with an event at the Teamsters Local 249 banquet hall in Lawrenceville.

While train travel has fallen by the wayside in much of America, whistle-stop tours are part of American political history. In recent times, Barack Obama in January 2009 greeted voters from the back of a rail car as part of his inauguration whistle-stop tour — with Biden along for the ride — from Philadelphia through Delaware and Maryland to Washington, D.C. The train followed the same route that Abraham Lincoln rode 150 years before.

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President-elect Barack Obama, right, and Vice President-elect Joe Biden wave from their train as they pass through Edgewood, Md., during their inaugural whistle stop train trip on Jan. 17, 2009.

It’s a natural turn for Biden, who as a senator took the train daily for decades from his home in Wilmington, Del., to Washington. Wednesday’s trip, which departs from Cleveland following the first of three presidential debates between Biden and President Donald Trump, will head for Pittsburgh, Greensburg, New Alexandria, Latrobe and Johnstown.

William Henry Harrison in 1836 became the first to presidential candidate to campaign from the back of a train, starting his tour in Wilmington, Del. He was defeated that year by Martin Van Buren, though he returned the favor four years later.

Other candidates have used campaign whistle-stop tours with varying degrees of success. Among those who traveled by train to deliver their campaign message were Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

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Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, greet a crowd on Oct. 23, 1960, at Union Station in Washington as they boarded a special train to start the Republican’s first whistle stop tour of the campaign.

Experts point to Harry Truman’s 31,000-mile, four-month train tour in 1948, which stopped in Pittsburgh as well as hundreds of other towns across America, as a strategic move that pushed a struggling president to a second term.

Truman’s time on the rails culminated in a famous photo of him standing on the back of a rail car, smiling and holding up a copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune with the erroneous headline “Dewey Defeats Truman,” from the paper’s early edition the morning after the election.

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In this Nov. 4, 1948, file photo, President Harry S. Truman at St. Louis’ Union Station holds up an election day edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune, which - based on early results - mistakenly announced "Dewey Defeats Truman."

Jimmy Carter would go on a lesser version of Truman’s tour in September 1976, traveling by rail with stops in small towns through New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, ending with a stop in Pittsburgh.

Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, left, waves from the rear of a train at New York’s Penn Station on Sept. 20, 1976, before the start of a three-state whistlestop campaign tour.

On a cloudy Sunday morning in April 1988, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis — then battling for the Democratic nomination in Pennsylvania’s presidential primary — took to the rails in Pittsburgh for a whistle-stop tour that would include a stop at the Greensburg train station.

In August 2000, George W. Bush kicked off a whistle-stop tour in Pittsburgh in the hard-fought campaign that would ultimately lead him to the White House.

In August 2000, George W. Bush, as Republican candidate for president, speaks to a crowd at Station Square at the start of a campaign whistle-stop tour.

Although Obama never did a Western Pennsylvania whistle-stop tour, he did ride the rails for a series of campaign stops between Harrisburg and Philadelphia during his 2008 Pennsylvania primary campaign.

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U.S. Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Bob Casey Jr., D-Pa., left, wave on the train as they pass the train station in Wayne, Pa., on April 19, 2008, as Obama sought the Democratic nomination over Hillary Clinton.