Top to bottom:
Biden at age
10; Biden, his
late wife, Neilia,
and their sons
celebrate the
Senator-elect’s
30th birthday;
a 1988 portrait
of then-Senator
Joe Biden.
I was meeting up with the
train that would carry President Obama and me to our
inauguration.
That day, Gregg Weaver, a
conductor who started riding
Amtrak the same year I did—
1972—introduced me to the
crowd. As Gregg spoke, it
struck me that over the years,
Amtrak provided me with
more than a way to get to
Washington to serve the people of Delaware every morning and a way to get home to
my family each night. It has
provided me another family
entirely—a community of
dedicated professionals who
have shared the milestones
in my life, and who have
allowed me to share the milestones in theirs.
And it has provided me with one
thing more, an understanding of—and
a respect for—the role of rail travel in
our society and our economy.
Though I don’t get to ride the train
nearly as much anymore, those were
the lessons I brought with me on that
final trip to Washington as a United
States Senator.
Making Possibilities
I began making the 110-mile commute
shortly after I was sworn in as a Senator. It was the only way that I could
have been a Senator at all. I had to be
able to get home to spend evenings
with my two sons after we lost their
mother and sister in an auto accident a
month earlier.
A Brief
History of
Railroads
in America
1812
“Father of American Railroads” Col. John Stevens
(top right), an inventor
who is also considered the
father of American patent
law, publishes Documents
Tending to Prove the Superior Advantages of Railways and Steam Carriages
Over Canal Navigation.
Fourteen years later, in
1826, he builds and demonstrates America’s first
tubular-boiler locomotive
on a circular track, built on
his estate in Hoboken, N.J.
1828
Ground is broken on July
4 for America’s first “
common carrier” railroad,
the Baltimore and Ohio
(bottom left). The B&O
would go on to have a
substantial impact on the
young nation’s history—the
first telegraph lines were
erected along its right of
way and its link between
Washington, D.C., and the
Union states proved crucial
during the Civil War.
1861
Confederate
reinforce-
ments arriving
by rail turn the
tide in the First
Battle of Bull
Run, giving the
Southern gen-
eral Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson a
victory in the first major land battle
of the Civil War. Both the Confeder-
ate and Union sides would make
extensive use of rail to transport
troops and supplies throughout the
war, with the Union Army, espe-
cially, undertaking innovations to
equip rail cars with weaponry.
