George Francis Train

George Francis Train was born on March 24, 1829, in Boston, son of Oliver Train and his wife Maria Pickering.{{Cite web|title=George Francis Train Sets the Record as the Fastest Person to Travel Round-The-World |website=Round the World Flights|url=https://www.wingnet.org/rtw/RTW001O.HTM|access-date=December 11, 2021}} His cousin Adeline later became a noted author. His parents and three sisters died in a yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans in 1833 when George was four. He was raised by strict Methodist grandparents in Boston. They hoped George would become a minister.

He attended common schools, where he acquired knowledge about different countries, got exposed to logical ways of thinking, and honed mechanical engineering skills using toy blocks and sticks. His best friend in school had immigrated from England, and related to Train how difficult it was to get around in his hometown, Birkenhead.{{cite book |last1=Locke |first1=Jared |title=The Untold Stories of Forgotten Heroes of the Industrial Revolution |publisher=CDP Enterprises |page=83}} This is what inspired Train to set up a tramway system in the same town. He did not go into the ministry, instead becoming a businessman and adventure seeker.

Train entered the mercantile business in Boston, and made it his career all his life in the United States, Britain and in Australia. He initiated numerous new businesses, building the corporate and financial structures to make them work.

He and his wife arrived in Melbourne on 23 May 1853 aboard the Bavaria, where he became the local agent for the White Diamond Line. In partnership with another American, former mariner Captain Ebenezer Caldwell, he imported clothing, building materials, guns, flour, patent medicines, mining tools, coaches and carts. Caldwell, Train & Co. built warehouses at either end of the newly constructed railway line from Sandridge to Flinders St, making it easier for White Star Line passengers to move their luggage between port and city. He was involved in the Melbourne Chamber of Commerce and he helped establish a volunteer fire brigade in the city.

Train's wife returned to Boston in 1854 to give birth to their daughter. He left Australia in November 1855 to join her, travelling via the Orient and the Middle East.

In 1860 he went to England to found horse tramway companies in Birkenhead and London, where he soon met opposition. He was also involved in the construction of a short-lived horse tramway in Cork, Ireland.{{cite book |first=Walter |last=McGrath |title=Tram Tracks Through Cork |publisher=Tower Books |location=Cork |date=1981}} Although his trams were popular with passengers, his designs had rails that stood above the road surface and obstructed other traffic. In 1861 Train was arrested and tried for "breaking and injuring" Uxbridge Road in London.{{cite news |title=Police News |work=The Times |date=March 27, 1861}} He tried again with the Staffordshire Potteries Street Railway Company in 1861 and then with the Darlington Street Railroad Company in 1862, but the latter was short-lived, closing in 1865.

Train was involved in the formation of the Union Pacific Railroad (UP) in 1864 during the American Civil War. The federal government chartered the railroad for construction of the portion of the Transcontinental Railroad west of the Missouri River. Train helped set up the shadow finance company for the project, the Credit Mobilier of America, whose principal officers were the same as those of UP. (See below)

That year, he left the United States for England. Referring to himself as "Citizen Train", Train became a shipping magnate, a prolific writer, a minor presidential candidate after return to the United States, and a confidant of French and Australian revolutionaries. He claimed to have been offered the presidency of a proposed Australian republic, but declined. During the American Civil War, he gave numerous speeches in England in favor of the Union and denounced the Confederacy.

In 1868 Train was arrested while aboard the RMS Scotia in the port of Queenstown (now Cobh) in Ireland,{{cite news |url=https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/DSC18680331.2.24 |title=Arrest of George Francis Train |work=Daily Southern Cross |date=March 31, 1868}} and held in custody. He had in his possession speeches he had given in the United States in defense of the Fenian cause of Irish independence. These documents were seized by a local magistrate. His release four days later was on condition that he disavow any intention of promoting Fenianism while in Ireland or England.

In the middle of his campaign for president in 1870, Train decided to make a trip around the globe, which was covered by many newspapers. The actual traveling took 80 days, though he stayed two months in France, supporting the Paris Commune, for which he spent two weeks in jail (the US government and Alexandre Dumas intervened to get him released).{{cite web |url=https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/george-francis-train-one-of-few-sane-men-mad-mad-world/ |title=George Francis Train, One of the Few Sane Men in a Mad, Mad World |website=New England Historical Society|date=March 2015 }}

His exploits possibly inspired Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Eighty Days; the protagonist Phileas Fogg is believed to have been partially modeled on Train.

While in Europe after his 1870 trip, Train met with the Grand Duke Constantine.{{which|date=September 2015}} During that period, he persuaded the Queen of Spain to back construction of a railway in the backwoods of Pennsylvania. Her support provided funding for the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad.{{clarify|date=February 2024}} He promoted and built tramways in Britain after opposition which he overcame by agreeing to run the rails level with the streets.{{cite news |title=Street Tramways |work=The Times |date=May 26, 1869}}

On his return to the U.S., Train's popularity and reputation soared. He began promoting the Union Pacific Railroad, with which he had been involved for several years, despite the advice of Vanderbilt, who told him it would never work. Forming a finance company called Credit Foncier of America, Train made a fortune from real estate when the transcontinental railway opened up for colonization huge swaths of western America, including large amounts of land in Council Bluffs, Iowa; Omaha, Nebraska; and Columbus, Nebraska. He was responsible for building the Cozzens Hotel and founding Train Town in Omaha.

Train was noted for having created the Credit Mobilier in 1864, started to finance the Union Pacific. While appearing to be a separate, independent company which Union Pacific hired, Crédit Mobilier was staffed by the same officers as the railroad. Train and others created a structure that allowed them to realize outsize profits during the railroad's construction. The story about this scam and congressional graft was broken in 1872 by The Sun, a New York newspaper opposed to the re-election of Ulysses S. Grant for president. Eventually the scandals resulted in congressional and executive federal investigations which implicated numerous congressmen, including James Garfield.{{cite book |last=McCague |first=J. |date=1964 |title=Moguls and Iron Men: The Story of the First Transcontinental Railroad |publisher=Harper and Row |page=135}} Denying the charges, Grant was re-elected as president.

In 1872, Train ran for president of the United States as an independent candidate. He was a supporter of the temperance movement. That year, he was jailed on obscenity charges while defending Victoria Woodhull for her newspaper's reporting of the alleged adulterous affair of abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton. He was the primary financier of the newspaper The Revolution, which was dedicated to women's rights and published by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

As he aged, Train seemingly became more eccentric. In 1873, he was arrested and threatened with institutionalization in an insane asylum.{{cite news |title=George Francis Train Not to be Sent to an Insane Asylum. |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1873/03/27/archives/george-francis-train-not-to-be-sent-to-an-insane-asylum.html |quote=... that George Francis Train, now confined in the Tombs for an obscene paper, ... |work=New York Times |date=March 27, 1873 |access-date=January 5, 2009 }}

He stood for the position of dictator of the United States, charged admission fees to campaign rallies, and drew record crowds. He became a vegetarian and adopted various fads. Instead of shaking hands with other people, he shook hands with himself, a manner of greeting he claimed to have seen in China. He spent his final days on park benches in New York City's Madison Square Park, handing out dimes and refusing to speak to anyone but children and animals.

In 1890, Nellie Bly traveled around the world in 72 days, instigating Train to do a second circumnavigation of the earth in the same year. He completed the trip from Tacoma, Washington, and back in 67 days 12 hours and 1 minute, a world record at the time.{{cite news |title=Streetcars named desire ... and some other things too |url=http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/history/memories/4011683.Streetcars_named_desire_______and_some_other_things_too/ |work=The Northern Echo |date=December 31, 2008 |access-date=January 5, 2009 }} A plaque in Tacoma commemorates the location where the 1890 trip began and ended. Train was accompanied on many of his travels by George Pickering Bemis, his cousin and private secretary. Bemis was later elected as mayor of Omaha, Nebraska.

In 1892, the town of Whatcom, Washington, offered to finance yet another trip around the world in order to publicize itself. Train finished this trip in a record 60 days.{{Cite book |last=Wallace |first=Irving |title=The Square Pegs Some Americans Who Dared To Be Different |date=1957 |publisher=Alfred A. Knopf |oclc=754213 |pages=93–94}}

He became ill with smallpox while visiting his daughter Susan M. Train Gulager in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1903.{{cite news |title=Went from Mills Hotel to Daughter's Home in Stamford. |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1903/05/22/archives/george-francis-train-ill-with-smallpox-went-from-mills-hotel-to.html |quote=George Francis Train, the well-known New Yorker, is ill with smallpox at the residence of his daughter, Mrs. Susan M.T. Gulager, in this city. It is a light case and the physicians attending him said to-night that they were hopeful the patient would recover. They admitted, however, that the disease has not yet reached the stage where the outcome could be foretold with any degree of certainty. |work=New York Times |date=May 22, 1903 |access-date=January 5, 2009 }}

On January 5, 1904, Train died of heart failure in New York. At the time of his death, he was living in a cheap lodging house named the Mills Hotel.{{Cite news|title=Death of Citizen Train|date=January 22, 1904|work=Derry Journal}} He was buried at a small private ceremony at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. After his death, The Thirteen Club, of which he was a member, passed a resolution that he was one of the few sane men in "a mad, mad world."{{cite news |title='Citizen' Train Buried |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1904/01/22/archives/citizen-train-buried-services-attended-by-representatives-of.html |quote=Services Attended by Representatives of Several Societies. Family Orders Flowers Sent by Friends to be Distributed Among Children in Hospitals. |work=New York Times |date=January 22, 1904 |access-date=January 5, 2009 }}

File:Train Villa beachholm newport rhode island.jpg]]

Train married Wilhelmina Wilkinson Davis in 1851, with whom he had four children, including daughter Susan M. Train Gulager.{{Australian Dictionary of Biography|first=E. Daniel|last=Potts|year=1976|volume=6|id2=train-george-francis-4745|title=George Francis Train|access-date=13 January 2015}}

In 1869, Train erected a large Italianate summer cottage in Newport, Rhode Island. Known as Train Villa, it stood at Bellevue Avenue at Bailey's Beach. After Train's death, it was renamed Beachholm. It was destroyed by fire in the 1970s.{{cite book |last1=Miller |first1=Paul |title=Lost Newport |date=2008 |publisher=Applewood Books |page=93 |isbn=978-1-55709-091-1 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=VPhNj_9yOt0C&dq=train+villa+newport+demolished&pg=PA93 |access-date=24 April 2022}}

• [https://archive.org/details/anamericanmerch00traigoog An American Merchant in Europe, Asia, and Australia] (1851)
• Young America Abroad (1857)
• [https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_7QNsbS_UamwC Young America in Wall Street] (1858)
• Irish Independency (1865)
• Championship of Women (1868)
• [https://archive.org/details/mylifeinmanysta00traigoog My Life in Many States and in Foreign Lands] (1902)

{{quotation|

"The story of a remarkable and adventurous life. Mr. Train was at one time one of the best known Americans on the face of the globe. He organized the clipper ship line that sailed around Cape Horn to San Francisco; he organized the Credit Mobilier and the Union Pacific Railroad; he was one of the organizers of the French Commune; he built the first street-railway in England; he has been the business partner of queens, emperors, and grand dukes, and the familiar friend of some of the greatest people in the world. His story up to the present is one long romance."{{Cite magazine

| title = Weekly Record of New Publications

| magazine= The Publishers Weekly

| volume = 62

| issue = 20

| page = 1007

| publisher = F. Leypoldt

| location = New York

|date=November 15, 1902

| url = https://books.google.com/books?id=9R8DAAAAYAAJ&q=clipper+memoriam&pg=PT668

| access-date = March 1, 2010}}

| Publishers Weekly, Weekly Record of Publications (1902)}}

• Tramways Act 1870

{{Reflist}}

• {{NIE |wstitle=Train, George Francis |volume=19 |page=467}}

• {{Gutenberg author | id=Train,+George+Francis | name=George Francis Train}}
• {{Internet Archive author |sname=George Francis Train}}
• [http://www.twainquotes.com/gftrain.html Twain on Train]
• [http://www.allenfoster.com/chap1.htm "Around the World with Citizen Train" ] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050901001559/http://allenfoster.com/chap1.htm |date=September 1, 2005 }}
• [http://www.kpluwonders.org/content/why-tacoma-owes-its-slogan-crazy-person Why Tacoma owes its slogan to a 'crazy person']

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Category:1829 births

Category:1904 deaths

Category:American businesspeople in shipping

Category:American railroad executives

Category:American businesspeople in real estate

Category:American temperance activists

Category:American travel writers

Category:Around the World in Eighty Days

Category:Burials at Green-Wood Cemetery

Category:Businesspeople from Boston

Category:Businesspeople from Omaha, Nebraska

Category:Candidates in the 1872 United States presidential election

Category:Jules Verne

Category:Massachusetts independents

Category:Union Pacific Railroad