European Railroad Discussion > Amtrak Joe to Kiev

Both the BBC and the New York Times are reporting that President Biden took a 10-hour train trip from Poland to Kiev.
No comment as to whether it was armored like Putin's.  (Of course not.)
BTW the US gave Russia advance notice of a few hours that Biden was coming.

I was blown away when I read about this.  The American president never travels by train in the US.  Bush did some campaigning in the 90s, but it was a massive security operation.  Biden's trip was a long 10 hours into a war zone and Russia was told about it so I suppose they could not just accidentally blow up the train. I guess if anything was to happen we would fire the nukes.  Some kind of irony here that the president will travel through a war zone on a train, but too much of a security risk at home to travel by train. At least that is my assumption as the last president to travel by train was Obama on his way to the inauguration before he was president.

 

Todd Clark
Canyon Country, CA
Trainorders.com

Bill Clinton did a campaign trip through West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio by train in 1996. The last sitting POTUS to do so.

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Paul Wilson
Arlington, VA

Bill Clinton also rode a MARC special train to the Oriole Camden Yards back in April of 1993.  I had to check Bob Withers's "The President Travels by Train" for the date the consist. It was all MARC equipment plus an Amtrak office car.  I rode the 2nd MARC locomotive with an FRA guy.

webmaster Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I was blown away when I read about this.  The
> American president never travels by train in the
> US.  Bush did some campaigning in the 90s, but it
> was a massive security operation.  Biden's trip
> was a long 10 hours into a war zone and Russia was
> told about it so I suppose they could not just
> accidentally blow up the train. I guess if
> anything was to happen we would fire the nukes. 
> Some kind of irony here that the president will
> travel through a war zone on a train, but too much
> of a security risk at home to travel by train. At
> least that is my assumption as the last president
> to travel by train was Obama on his way to the
> inauguration before he was president.
>
>  
My guess is that the secret service (and no doubt others) did a risk analysis of flying the President into Kyiv vs coming in by rail, and decide rail was a safer choice.

WP17

I'm told they ran 3 identical consists to make it impossible to tell which one POTUS was riding in. Definitely safer than risking a hypersonic missle striking AF 1 .  Proud of him to go to those lengths to show our support for the Ukrainian people suffering as they are from Putin's terrible war. I hope I live long enough to see him prosecuted for his war crimes.

    Ross Rowland 

I heard that, Russ!

webmaster Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I was blown away when I read about this.  The
> American president never travels by train in the
> US.  Bush did some campaigning in the 90s, but it
> was a massive security operation.  Biden's trip
> was a long 10 hours into a war zone and Russia was
> told about it so I suppose they could not just
> accidentally blow up the train. I guess if
> anything was to happen we would fire the nukes. 
> Some kind of irony here that the president will
> travel through a war zone on a train, but too much
> of a security risk at home to travel by train. At
> least that is my assumption as the last president
> to travel by train was Obama on his way to the
> inauguration before he was president.
>
>  

Excuse me but am I not correct that Joe Biden rode from his home in Delaware to D.C. when he was a senator on almost all work days.  The nickname AMTRAK JOE came from somewhere, Maybe now he simply couldn't get anywhere quick enough or to the designated destination if an attempt was made to use the US rail system, especially if the right-of-way was Norfolk Southern owned.

Hello everybody,

why in hell should Mr. Putin blow Mr. Biden up? To the best of my knowledge U.S. companies still have a presence in Russia. The only ones who got hit to some extent were McDonalds and Burger King, which are really visible. As far as I am concerned there does not seem to be missed much with these. Everybody else just tries to do business and stay out of sight. I know that  Indian branches are used to do business with Russia. The same would not surprise me about China. There are parallels to the past, too. GM had an (un-)visible presence in Germany beginning in 1929 continuing during the Second World War and thereafter. The presence's name was Opel. They built a LOT of military trucks. Most likely there were others.

Cheers

kbs 651