HOUSTON | Thousands waved and cheered as they stood along the route as funeral train 4141 — for the 41st president — carried George H.W. Bush’s remains en route to their final resting place in Texas on Thursday, his last journey as a week of national remembrance took on a decidedly personal feel in an emotional home state farewell.
Some people placed coins along the tracks that wound through small town Texas so a 420,000-pound locomotive pulling the nation’s first funeral train in nearly 50 years could crunch them into souvenirs. Others took photos or crowded for views so close that police helicopters overhead were forced to warn them back.
The scenes harkened back to a bygone era were a far cry from a serious and more somber mood at an earlier funeral service at a Houston church, where Bush’s former secretary of state and confidant for decades, James Baker, addressed him as “jefe,” Spanish for “boss.” At times choking back tears, Baker praised Bush as “a beautiful human being” who had “the courage of a warrior. But when the time came for prudence, he maintained the greater courage of a peacemaker.”
Baker also provided a contrast with today’s divisive political rhetoric, saying that Bush’s “wish for a kinder, gentler nation was not a cynical political slogan. It came honest and unguarded from his soul.”
The world became a better place because George Bush occupied the White House for four years,” said Baker.
After the funeral, as the motorcade carrying Bush’s remains drove away along a closed highway from the church to the train station, construction workers on all levels of an unfinished building paused to watch, while a man sitting on a ferris wheel near the aquarium in downtown Houston waved.
Bush’s remains were later moved onto a special train in a car fitted with clear sides so people could catch a glimpse of the casket as it rumbled by. The train traveled about 70 miles in two-plus hours — the first presidential funeral train journey since Dwight D. Eisenhower’s remains went from Washington to his native Kansas 49 years ago — to the family plot on the presidential library grounds at Texas A&M University. Bush’s final resting place is alongside his wife, Barbara, and Robin Bush, the daughter they lost to leukemia at age 3.
In the town of Cypress, 55-year-old Doug Allen left eight coins on the tracks before the train passed — three quarters, three dimes and two pennies. The train left the coins flattened and slightly discolored.
“It’s something we’ll always keep,” Allen said.
Andy Gordon, 38, took his 6-year-old daughter, Addison, out of school so she and her 3-year-old sister, Ashtyn, could see the train pass in Pinehurst, Texas.
“Hopefully, my children will remember the significance and the meaning of today,” Gordon said. Addison was carrying two small American flags in her hand.
