Today, I’d like to discuss an act of giving that took place almost 80 years ago. In the aftermath of World War II, France and its people had been devastated by the conflict. In spite of this fact, its citizens worked together to honor the Americans who helped liberate their country from the Nazis. During the First World War, boxcars had been used to transport men and material to and from the front. Four years after the Second World War ended, France sent forty-nine of these boxcars back to America filled to their rafters with gifts. Each of the forty-eight states in the Union received one, along with one for the District of Columbia and Hawaii both. Despite everything they had endured, the French people willingly gifted their belongings in thanks for what this country had done to free them.
Though many of the boxcars remain in museums and memorials to this day, several were eventually destroyed or went missing. One of the latter was the boxcar sent to my home state of New Jersey. After 1958, it vanished from the historical record. Thirty-five years later, a Merci Train boxcar was found in Tennessee and moved into storage by the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City. Its identity was unknown until last year, when a historian was able to confirm that it was New Jersey’s.
As of this fall, the Merci Train boxcar rests proudly at the United Railroad Historical Society of New Jersey’s repair shop. The organization’s ultimate goal is to fully restore it to how it looked when it arrived here back in 1949. It was an act of giving that sent it thousands of miles from its original home laden with the possessions of those who had lived through the worst war in history, all of them willingly parted with in thanks. 76 years on, it was an act of giving that returned it to its new home after being lost for decades.
Merry Christmas.
Fossil
Article URL : https://www.urhs.org/mercitrain