“Indianapolis” 500 Private Car History
Pullman Company built 1913
This car was originally built by the Pullman Company in 1913 as a business car for the Seaboard Air Line Railroad carrying the name “Baltimore”. The car was renamed several times by the Seaboard, it held the names Southland and Birmingham. The car was sold by the railroad in the early 1907s. David McClure, a long time member of the Indiana Railway Museum, purchased the car and had it restored and rehabilitated so that it could be used on excursions and be used on Amtrak trains. In 1982 the car took its first Amtrak excursion. Over the following decades the car traveled tens-of-thousands of miles in the US, Mexico and Canada. The Indiana Transportation Museum used the car on steam excursions with Nickel Plate 587. The car is named “Indianapolis” and numbered 500 as a reference to the Indianapolis 500 race. In 2005 the car was retired from excursion service and found its home in French Lick. David McClure would donate the car to the Indiana Railway Museum in 2017.
