(The Associated Press circulated the following story by Jennifer Loven on January 18, 2009.)
WILMINGTON, Del. — President-elect Barack Obama is promising that he and Vice President-elect Joe Biden “will fight for you every day we’re in Washington” as the pair visited Delaware en route by train to the capital.
Obama paid tribute to Biden, who has commuted by Amtrak from Delaware to Congress for several years. He told a cheering crowd that getting things right for the country is the reason he asked Biden “to take one more ride to Washington.”
At his Wilmington stop, Obama plunged into the crowd and greeted the people. He used his talk to voice the same refrain of recent days: the country should not get discouraged because of its dire economic straits.
A buoyant Obama earlier had waved to cheering throngs of people standing, leaning and jumping along railroad tracks as his whistle stop train slowed to a crawl in Claymont, Del.
Standing on the caboose’s flag-draped platform in front of a presidential insignia, he waved enthusiastically as he rode by. He and his wife, Michelle, and daughters Malia and Sasha got an enthusiastic send-off a short time earlier when the train pulled out of Philadelphia’s 30th St. station.
As the train lumbered out of Philadelphia, a conductor bellowed: “Welcome aboard the 2009 inaugural train to DC.”
The route — the same that Abraham Lincoln took nearly a century and a half ago — was 137 miles long, and Obama’s arrival in the nation’s capital was scheduled after the fall of dark Saturday. A couple such “slow-moving” visits were scheduled along the way.
The 10-car train built by Pullman Standard in 1939 moved at a fairly fast clip for the 45-minute ride to Wilmington, Del., passing knots of crowds gathered in the bitter cold so as not to miss their piece of the historic events. Commuter train platforms were filled, and smaller groups stood along the train tracks in between as well.