began in Wilmington, Delaware, and headed northeast to New England, west through Pennsylvania, Ohio to Michigan, then around Lake Michigan to Illinois and Wisconsin. From the Midwest, the tour continued westward, zigzagging across the plains to Utah and then up to the Pacific Northwest. From Seattle, Washington, the tour then traveled south along the Pacific coast to southern California. The train and crew spent Christmas 1975 in Pomona, California, decorating the locomotive with a large profile of Santa Claus on the front of the smokebox above the front coupler. For 1976, the tour continued from southern California eastward through Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, then turned north to visit Kansas and Missouri before traveling through the Gulf Coast states and then north again to Pennsylvania. The tour continued southeast to New Jersey then south along the Atlantic coast before finally ending December 26, 1976, in Miami, Florida. The last visitor went through the train on December 31, 1976. In early 1977, National Museums of Canada bought 15 of the cars and used them from 1978 to 1980 on a rail tour across Canada as the Discovery Train, a mobile museum focusing on that country's history. See also Freedom Bell, American Legion traveled on the American Freedom Train alongside a Lunar Rover test article. Crusade for Freedom; a Cold War public relations effort following the first Freedom Train. References Bibliography Wall, Wendy L. Inventing the "American Way": The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement. Oxford University Press, 2008. Green, Laurie B. Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle". University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Little, Stuart J. "The Freedom Train: Citizenship and Postwar Political Culture 1946-1949", American Studies 34(1), Spring 1993, pp. 35–67. Accessed via JStor, 1 September 2014. McGinnis, John Vianney. "The Advertising Council and the Cold War". Dissertation at Syracuse University, accepted May 15, 1991. White, John. "Civil Rights in Conflict: The "Birmingham plan" and the Freedom Train, 1947", Alabama Review'' 52(2), April 1999. External links The Story of 1947–1949 Freedom Train and the 1975–1976 Bicentennial American Freedom Train . Lincoln Highway Museum & Archives ThemeTrains.com – Information on both Freedom Trains, DVD documentaries, decals for modeling the '76 train in HO and N scales. History of rail transportation in the United States History of racial segregation in the United States United States Bicentennial 1947 in the United States 1948