Barack Obama will herald his new era of change today by rolling back the years to launch four days of inaugural festivities on a slow train to Washington.
He will ride the rails from Philadelphia, the cradle of US independence more than 200 years ago, to marbled Union Station less than a mile from the spot where he will be sworn in as the first African-American president on Tuesday.
The rumbling "whistle stop" journey is part homage to Obama's hero, former president Abraham Lincoln, like Obama a former Illinois legislator who capped a cross-country train ride along the same route on the way to his inauguration in 1861.
But whereas Lincoln and subsequent presidents once spent days wending their way across the frigid prairies, Obama, a Blackberry-toting product of the jet age, will trundle along on the railroad for just one day.
He will clamber aboard his train, carrying selected supporters, his Secret Service protectors and a big media pack at Philadelphia's 30th Street station to start his 225 kilometers trek southwest.
The train will first slow to a crawl in the town of Claymont, Delaware to allow Obama greet wellwishers.
First stop: Wilmington, Delaware, where Obama will pick up vice-president-to-be Joseph Biden in the small state, which he served in the US Senate until his resignation on Thursday.
Biden might know every sleeper and inch of track -- each day for his 36 years in Congress he commuted to Washington from his home city, which now offers an unwitting reminder of the economic malaise as a hub of the credit card industry.
