On July 15—the day Truman arrived in Chicago, and four days before the convention was to begin—a train pulled into the city’s Fifty-first Street rail yard shortly after noon, to be serviced. One of the cars was the Ferdinand Magellan. From the outside, it looked like any old train car, but a close look revealed it was not ordinary at all. The train car weighed about 285,000 pounds, far more than a regular Pullman, due to its bulletproof window glass and 5∕8-inch nickel-steel armor plate on the track. It had been purposely built with so much heft that a dynamite charge would not derail it.
...more
