[1][2] As the second head of the EPA under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Train helped place the issue of the environment on the presidential and national agenda in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a key period in the environmental movement.

[3][4] Train was born on June 4, 1920, in Jamestown, Rhode Island, but grew up in Washington, D.C. His father was an officer in the United States Navy who was frequently away on assignment.

Train and his older brothers, Cuthbert and Middleton, to spend the night at the White House, where they slept in the Andrew Jackson bedroom and breakfasted with the president and Mrs. Hoover on the portico overlooking the Ellipse and the Washington Monument.

Early in his career, Train served from 1949 to 1956 as Attorney, Chief Counsel, and Minority Advisor on various Congressional committees and from 1956 to 1957 as Assistant to the Secretary and Head of the Legal Advisory Staff for the U.S. Treasury Department.

[7] When the World Wildlife Fund (U.S.) was formed in Washington, D.C., on December 1, 1961, Russell Train became its first ever Vice-President; in later years he was named Chair Emeritus of the WWF.

In this role, Train helped to bring the environment to the American public's consciousness and lobbied for a high-level policy group at the highest levels of government.

As head of the EPA under Presidents Nixon and Ford, Train is generally credited with helping to place the issue of the environment on the presidential and national agenda in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a key period in the environmental movement.

Under his guidance, World Wildlife Fund-US expanded its focus not only on species-related conservation projects, but also on protecting habitat by establishing national parks and nature reserves.

Through Train's efforts, in 1983 the WWF-administered J. Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation Prize was presented to awardees in the White House Rose Garden by President Ronald Reagan.

In 2001, Train received the 7th Annual Heinz Award Chairman's Medal, 2001,[13] a prestigious prize honoring individuals who have made extraordinary achievements on issues of importance.

Train was recognized as "a tireless advocate for the cause of the environment since 1961… the architect of an environmental agenda without parallel in history in its scope…and as a "truly outstanding example of how a single life can make a difference in the world.

[14] Train collected printed books, manuscripts, photographs, maps, artifacts, and artwork on African exploration, big-game hunting, natural history, and wildlife conservation, dating primarily from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The collection includes correspondence, drafts of publications, diaries, account books, ephemera, posters, news-clippings, biographies, memoirs, portraits, and the former personal property of selected explorers, big game hunters, missionaries, pioneers, and naturalists in Africa.

Besides Roosevelt, the major persons represented in the Train Africana Collection include the journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley and members of his Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (Thomas Heazle Parke, Robert H. Nelson, James S. Jameson, John Rose Troup, William Bonny, William Grant Stairs, Edmund Musgrave Barttelot, and Arthur J. M. Jephson); the medical missionary Dr. David Livingstone and his father-in-law Robert Moffat; taxidermist Carl Akeley; zoologist Edmund Heller; hunter Frederick Selous; artist and adventure writer A. Radclyffe Dugmore; explorers Samuel Baker, Thomas Baines, Richard Francis Burton and E.J.