Royal train
It was gifted to King Frederik VII by Peto, Brassey & Betts to the inauguration of the railway between Flensborg-Tønning.
In 1935 its wooden coach body was sold to greengrocer Møller and used as a summer house in Hurup Thy until 1983 when it donated to the DJK (Dansk Jernbane-Kub) Danish railway club.
For her 60th birthday in 2000, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark received a new royal coach with a drawing room, sleeping compartments and kitchen.
[3] Today the cars are held in storage in the obscure Railway Museum the yards of Legehar train station, but as of the early 2000s were kept in good condition and are occasionally open for public viewing.
So Prince Frederick of Prussia (later German Emperor) travelled in a first class compartment in 1851 when the train derailed in the vicinity of Gütersloh.
After 30 years of use they became technically outdated, so in 1889 the new emperor, Wilhelm II, who was always very interested in engineering and technological developments started to order new coaches.
The dedicated locomotive-hauled set was retired in the 2000s and replaced by the specially built E655 series EMU, which can also be used as a VIP charter trainset.
When the emperor must travel on the Shinkansen or private railways, other trainsets may be used for Omeshi Ressha service, such as the Kintetsu 50000 series EMU for visits to Ise Grand Shrine.
These trainsets are otherwise operated regularly for passenger service, but as is the case with the Kintetsu 50000 or the N700 Series Shinkansen, may have carriages retrofitted with bulletproof windows to accommodate the emperor.
The Moroccan royal train was composed of SPV-2000 railcars produced by Budd Company in the US and delivered in the early 1980s.
[12] The Dutch State Railways (NS) uses a single royal carriage to transport the king and his family.
It replaced a previous two-carriage royal train built in 1930, which is currently on display in the Dutch Railway Museum.
The Romanian Royal Train was ordered by King Ferdinand I of Romania in 1926 to Ernesto Breda/Construzioni Meccaniche plants in Milan.
On 3 January 1948 King Michael I and his mother, Queen Elena, were forced into exile by the newly installed Communist authorities.
After a thorough luggage search for values, the King left Romania (from Sinaia) for Austria, in the Royal Train, with tightly closed windows and under strict supervision.
Starting in 2012, the Royal Train is annually used by the Romanian royal family (Crown Princess Margareta, the eldest daughter and heir of King Michael) for public events, mainly trips with political and symbolic significance as well as travelling between the Balkan countries.
The first one was on 1 December (celebration of National Union of Romania) one the route Sinaia, Bușteni, Predeal, Brașov, Codlea, Făgăraş, Avrig and Sibiu and it was met with huge public appreciation and participation at stops; another trip was in remembrance of the royal family, Parliament and Government retreat from Bucharest to Iași in World War I, during the German occupation of Bucharest.
The catastrophic derailment of the Russian Royal Train on 17 October 1888 killed 21 people, however Alexander III, along with his wife and children, survived.
[18] The emperor also had at his disposal a standard gauge Imperial Train, used for traveling to Europe; this train set was purchased by the Russian Railway Ministry from Chemins de fer de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée in the 1870s, and was deemed to be technologically obsolescent.
The new broad-gauge Imperial Train for domestic travel became ready in time for the coronation of Nicholas II in 1896.
It was later captured by the Nazis, who stripped it of much of its piping, plumbing and wiring and looted any items of value during the Second World War.
[22] The three-month-long British royal family tour of South Africa in 1947 saw the ordering of eight ivory-painted air-conditioned saloons from Britain, three of which were built to Blue Train sleeping car standards, while the remaining five were special saloons for use by the royal family and Field Marshal Jan Smuts, the South African prime minister.
The different cars were rebuilt, refurbished and replaced continuously over the years, and some of them are now on display at the Swedish Railway Museum in Gävle.
Soon, other major British railway companies had their own carriage(s) dedicated for use by the royal family or other dignitaries.
In 1948, upon the formation of British Railways, the individual regions continued to maintain their own royal train carriages.
A single "Royal Train" was only formed in 1977 as a response to the demands of the Silver Jubilee of Elizabeth II.
Presidents of the United States often traveled in presidential railcars and Soviet leaders had special trains.
