George Francis Train was born in Boston in 1829 and moved with his family to New Orleans, where an 1833 yellow fever epidemic killed his parents and three sisters. Raised by strict Methodist grandparents who wanted him to become a minister, he went into trade instead. In 1853 he reached Melbourne during the gold rush and built warehouses linked to the new railway to clear the port’s bottleneck. In the 1860s he built horse tramways in Birkenhead, London and Cork, and was arrested in London for “breaking and injuring” the Uxbridge Road because his raised rails wrecked carriage wheels, so he redesigned them flush with the street. Ignoring Cornelius Vanderbilt’s warnings, he helped organize the Union Pacific and its construction company, Credit Mobilier of America.
In 1870, while running for president as an independent, he set out to circle the world in 90 days. In Marseille he joined a communalist uprising, was jailed for 13 days in Lyon and was freed after U.S. intervention and Alexandre Dumas’s advocacy. The trip took 164 days, but Train claimed 80 days of travel, and his journey is widely credited with inspiring Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. After obscenity charges and threats of an asylum, he withdrew to New York park benches, spoke only to children and animals and shook his own hand. He died in 1904 at the Mills Hotel.
- Credit Mobilier billed the Union Pacific inflated construction costs while the same men controlled both companies; an 1872 exposé implicated James Garfield.
- He used the profits to buy land along the route and founded Train Town in Omaha.
- He financed The Revolution, the women’s rights paper of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
- After Nellie Bly’s 72-day trip in 1890 he circled the globe in 67 days, and later in 60 days.
- The Thirteen Club declared him “one of the few sane men in a mad, mad world.”
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