Farewell, Gratitude Train

I often walk to campus, passing American Legion Post 6 at Pickens and Whaley streets. There's an old boxcar parked in the lot to the side of the building, visible from the street but behind a fence that you need to walk around to get to it. Since I moved to Columbia (it's been two years and change now), I never bothered to  walk back around the building to have a closer look. So I didn't learn until yesterday (from an article in The State) the story behind South Carolina's "Gratitude Train." 

The narrow gauge boxcar is a "Forty and Eight" (so named because it could carry forty people or eight horses) that was widely used in Europe during the early twentieth century. According the newspaper article, the boxcar at the American Legion

"was part of a 49-car “gratitude train” from France that sent one boxcar to each of the 48 states and the District of Columbia as thanks for the United States’ participation in World War II and America’s aid afterward."

The boxcar is scheduled to be moved to Bishopville, South Carolina. Alert readers of this blog may remember my brief visit to Bishopville and my students' drawings of me being attacked by the Lizard Man of Lee County, "evidence" of which is curated at the South Carolina Cotton Museum in Bishopville.

I took a few minutes to detour around the fence and have a look at the boxcar myself before it is moved. There's more to learn about this, but for now I'm just going to post some of the pictures I took.