Dear all, (and AndyB who posted on 05/16/2013) can you please contact me? I would love to get in touch with bystanders of their relatives, who stood alongside the tracks and made photos or films of the funeral train of Robert F. Kennedy. As a Dutch photographer and teacher I am doing research on photography and memory. Even though I do work and live in the Netherlands, I sense that this event will still arouse vivid memories in the minds of many Americans. The images I am looking for don't have to be perfect, any visual material is welcome. I will gladly credit your photos and films wherever they’re used and I can compensate the potential expenses you need to make in digitizing the pictures. If you wish to learn more about my call, please, let me know. Thank you very much in advance for any kind of assistance!

Yours faithfully,

Rein Jelle Terpstra mail@reinjelleterpstra.nl

I was there. The crowd was so large I climbed a fence with a pole alongside. Stood on top of the fence with one arm around the pole, the other holding my camera.

Platforms were ground level and the crowd moved onto the tracks to get a view of the special train. "The Admiral",an express train heading to New York City from Chicago came around the curve just south of the station. "The Admiral's" GG1 locomotive sounded its horn,a long loud blast, but some of the people in the crowd did not clear the track in time and sadly two were killed and four seriously injured.

After the tragic accident the Penn Central ordered all train movement stopped until the special train passed. The funeral train arrived in Washington's Union Station four hours behind schedule and had caused disruption to the entire railroad.

What a wonderful photo of the last gasp of funeral trains and of public observance of such grief. Very 60's. Can't recall any major public funeral trains after this one.

Mr. WMtraveler. You are correct, but not totally right. There were three Kennedy Brothers, John (Jack), Robert (Bobby) and Edward (Teddy). Two of them were assassinated, John in 1963 and Robert in 1968.

[There were four Kennedy brothers. -tterrace]

"You feel all of the country is on display..."
Yes. When RFK was killed, my parents were stationed by the Foreign Service in Europe; we were in a restaurant in England right after we found out about the shooting, and there was a strong buzz of comments on the order of "These Americans shooting everyone who matters." The comments were genuinely aghast and puzzled, not mean spirited, but we were for sure on display to the world. Martin Luther King had just been shot at a moment when his fame and importance were growing overseas, and I had just been in a rather small "race riot" of demonstrations after his shooting; not a real riot, but exciting and disturbing stuff in my college town of Carlisle, Pennsylvania. As with JFK in 1960, RFK and MLK were overwhelmingly popular overseas, far more so than in there own country. I felt like a citizen of a surreal pariah nation that summer.

I thought Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.

[Yes. -tterrace]

Definitely from the moving train.

As Hackensacker commented on the slow 35mm film, the blurred background is a result of the photographer panning the shot to keep the mid-ground people fixed in the frame. You can see a lesser degree of lateral blurring in the foreground foliage, as well.

Fusco's photos from the RFK funeral train (published in book form for the first time a few years ago) present a deeply moving group portrait of a specific instant in American history. You feel all of the country is on display, united, fleetingly, in confusion and grief. The blurred backgrounds, which contribute so much to the sense of the world unfurling outside the train window, were the unwanted but inescapable result of the ASA 25 film he was using.

Between this post and the previous two, there's a James Ellroy novel in the making.

Was this taken from the moving train, or from across the tracks?

Wonder what the people looked like on the other side of the tracks.

As the funeral train approached Elizabeth, New Jersey, two people who were standing on an adjacent track to get a view of the funeral train were fatally struck by another train.

That was a common thing, to go out before your curls had set, and the butt of not a few jokes. Nobody does that anymore. Do they even still make curlers?

In the '80s, my dad worked next door to the Ambassador Hotel, where RFK was shot. I remember him taking me there and showing me the exact spot.