It has been more than 130 years since the black-draped funeral train of Abraham Lincoln traversed a nation in tears. Six million mourners lined the tracks, one third of the North’s population, most of them wearing black arm bands or mourning badges, bit players in a great national tragedy. The train went through 180 towns on its 1,666-mile snails-paced journey from Washington, D.C., to Lincoln’s burial site in Springfield.
Wayne Wesolowski retells the sad saga with the passion of an eyewitness. No detail escapes his probe.
He has become the keeper of the flame, handcrafting along with his son Steven an exact scale model of the United States, the ornate railcar that was built for Lincoln before he died but used only after his death. The railcar was destroyed in a 1911 fire.
To Wesolowski, who worries that “new heroes” have dimmed young people’s knowledge of Lincoln and his ideals, the five-year Lincoln Train Project, headed by honorary chairman Gov. Jim Edgar, has become a labor of love, his way of keeping alive “the lessons to be learned from the past.”
By exhibiting his meticulously accurate one-twelfth-scale model, which includes the Nashville locomotive that pulled the coach from Cleveland to Columbus, Ohio, and the horse-drawn hearse that met the casket in Springfield, Wesolowski hopes to rekindle interest in a traumatic chapter in our nation’s history.
Wesolowski sees nothing unusual about a chemistry professor building historic model trains.
“They’re both teaching. I get up every morning excited about what I’m going to teach. Good teachers aren’t trained. They’re born to teach,” said the loquacious Wesolowski, launching into a description of the differences between salt, diamond and graphite, spurred by their 3-D crystal structures hanging from his ceiling in the chemistry department of Illinois Benedictine College in Lisle.
Never mind that the subject was supposed to be the Lincoln funeral train.
The 50-year-old Wesolowski, who lives in Elburn, is a man whose excitement for learning refuses to be bottled up into neat categories.
“When I see children today who say they’re bored, that they have nothing to do, I say `baloney.’ What they need is something to do with their hands and with their mind. They need to get excited about something,” said Wesolowski, leading the way to IBC’s little-known Lincoln Library, where a vast array of books and artifacts is housed.
It was in this library that Wesolowski, author of four books, two videos and 140 articles on model railroading, which he co-authored with his wife, Mary Cay, learned from another Lincoln enthusiast and modeler, the late IBC vice president Thomas Dyba, about the funeral train.
“I was embarrassed. I didn’t know that there was this big funeral and train, and I’d been in model trains all my life. This was a whole new area to charge into,” said Wesolowski, whose interest in building models from scratch dates to his childhood when he and his late father, Edward, spent hours constructing elaborate train layouts in their Lombard basement.
“My dad went crazy over trains. If something got in the way like the stairs, he’d drill a hole right through them,” he said.
To Bill Schaumburg, editor of Railroad Model Craftsman, “Wayne Wesolowski is a model builder extraordinaire. He’s one of the most prolific authors in the 60-year history of scale-model railroading and certainly among the finest craftsmen,” said Schaumburg, who considers the Lincoln Train Project to be Wesolowski’s master work, although he’s most famous among national modelers for his Dr. Weso’s Weathering Goop, a popular homebrew technique used to make buildings look old.
Wesolowski’s mark can also be found at the West Chicago Historical Museum, the Batavia Depot Museum, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and the National Railroad Museum in Green Bay, Wis., where he has built parts of their model railroad layouts.
But his attention has been riveted on the Lincoln train in recent years.
“During the school year, I have to worry about quantum mechanics and differential equations and all the theories that are new in chemistry. In the summers, working on the Lincoln train, it’s a whole different world,” said Wesolowski.
Combing the country for photographs, documents, eyewitness accounts, family memorabilia and old books, he has compiled file drawers full of information.
“It’s probably the most complete collection in the country about the funeral train,” according to IBC historian Philip Bean, executive secretary of the Lincoln Group of Illinois. He said even the National Archives now refers people seeking information about the train to Wesolowski.
“I never want to build something that’s wrong. If I can’t prove it, I don’t want to build it,” said Wesolowski, acknowledging that viewers can’t see many of the tiny 725 parts (each one of them documented) that make up the train’s wheels and undercarriage, but “I know they’re there.”
He spent at least six months researching the train before starting to build the model with Steven, an IBC chemistry student, and is always on the lookout for new information. At the Union Pacific Corporation Museum in Omaha, Wesolowski stumbled across a l5-year-old engineering drawing of the president’s car and tracked down John Haines, the California engineer who drew it. A Civil War-era train expert, Haines agreed to render more complete drawings for Wesolowski.
In Chicago’s northern suburbs, he discovered George Lamason Jr., the great-great-grandson of the railcar’s designer-builder, who has the only surviving pass to ride the funeral train plus an heirloom chest built from the wood of Lincoln’s bier. A fellow IBC professor, Ken Nordin, came forward with one of the metal tassels that decorated the outside of the funeral car, handed down from a relative on his wife’s side. Wesolowski cast a plastic miniature of the tassel in his chemistry lab.
At West Point, Wesolowski stood on the exact spot where a cadet had stood 130 years ago to watch the funeral train come up the Hudson River Valley.
“On the platforms, and at the car windows, were generals famous in song and story, but we had eyes only for that solemn pile on which was laid all that was mortal of him who had become immortal, whose works and whose wisdom gain in worth and power with every added year, the inspiration of a reunited people so long as the flag shall float and the nation live,” the cadet wrote years later.
To Wesolowski, a burly man whose big hands seem ill suited to model making, the experience was electrifying.
“I felt a part of history.”
The same feeling swept over him again as he stood “on the very spot where Lincoln’s coffin had been in state 130 years earlier to the minute” at the Old State Capitol Building in Springfield. He was presenting his newly unveiled funeral car model to the Illinois State Preservation Society.
In his quest for facts, Wesolowski was as dogged as an investigative reporter on the scene. The Illinois Funeral Directors Association came up with vital information about Lincoln’s coffin and the 1860s embalming techniques (“arsenic and mercury that killed everything”) that allowed an open presidential casket during the 14-day cross-country trek, when crowds sometimes 12 abreast, in steady rain, all night long, moved silently past the bier at ceremonial stops.
An IBC nutrition professor, Cathy Matis, helped Wesolowski solve a lingering mystery about the color of the car, alternately described by eyewitnesses as “chocolate brown” or “claret red.” She led him to one of the country’s few chocolate historians, who explained that the word in 1865 meant a reddish maroon colored drink made from treated cocoa beans.
To figure out how to re-create the presidential hearse, Wesolowski crawled under a 19th Century hearse at Aurora’s Blackberry Farm Museum. “Maybe it’s a personality flaw,” he joked about his dogged demand for authenticity.
At a Barrington stable, he studied the differences between military and civilian harness styles so he could accurately depict, in miniature, the intricate harnessing of the six horses that drew the hearse.
Surveying the completed model, which stands 11 inches high and stretches 15 feet long, Wesolowski delights in describing the origins of each of its thousands of parts.
Tiny Christmas trees turned upside down and painted black became the perfect plumes on the Lincoln hearse. Wesolowski’s wife and mother-in-law, Frances Debowski, made the funereal buntings and fringe. Most of the parts, however, were cast in plastic in his chemistry lab, and Ron Lofman of Madison, Wis., crafted the scale figures, including the train engineer who bears a striking resemblance to the bespectacled Wesolowski.
His next project? He’s already at work on a scale model of Chicago Stadium’s 1929 Barton theater organ. At least this time around he won’t have to be an investigative sleuth. Wesolowski shot six rolls of film when the famous organ was being dismantled, and even talked Blackhawks’ organist Frank Pellico into letting him play it at the last Blackhawks’ regularly scheduled game at the Stadium.
“If I’m not in love with a project, I don’t want to do it,” he said.
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The Lincoln Train will be on display throughout February at the Lownik Library, Illinois Benedictine College, 5700 College Rd., Lisle. Telephone 708-960-1500.
