Monday, March 31, 2025 – ONE OF 48 GIFTS FROM FRANCE BEING RETURNED TO ITS HOME STATE
40 and 8:
New Jersey’s ‘Merci Train’ Boxcar
Returning Home
Monday, March 31, 2025
New York Almanack
ISSUE #1414
40 and 8: New Jersey’s ‘Merci Train’ Boxcar Returning Home
March 28, 2025 by Editorial Staff
New Jersey’s “Merci Train” boxcar, missing for nearly 45 years and feared to have been destroyed, is being returned to New Jersey.
In 1949 France gifted the United States 49 boxcars, the French Gratitude Train (Train de la Reconnaissance française), as a symbolic gesture of gratitude for American aid during and after World War II. The 130-year-old railroad cars, known as “40 and 8” boxcars, had been used to transport troops during the First World War and used again in the Second World War and by occupation forces after the war.
The boxcars arrived in Weehawken, New Jersey on February 2/3, 1949 filled with gifts from ordinary French and Italian citizens. More than six million people contributed, depositing dolls, statues, clothes, ornamental objects, furniture, and even a Legion of Honour medal purported to have belonged to Napoleon. Many of the gifts remain preserved in museum collections around the United States.
he Merci Train boxcars were opened and turned into traveling exhibits before each state committee distributed the entire contents.
New York’s contained, among many smaller gifts, a 500-pound bell cast in Annecy, France and labeled to the attention of Cardinal Francis Spellman. The bell was installed in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. The car was paraded down Broadway and around NYC before some 200,000 people before making a tour of the state.
New Jersey‘s boxcar had been missing since 1958, with unverified claims that it had been scrapped. It was rediscovered in a Tennessee field by the National World War I Museum and Memorial in 1993, accessioned into the museum’s collection and placed in storage in a Kansas City, Missouri warehouse.
The car was confirmed as the New Jersey boxcar in 2024, and donated to the United Railroad Historical Society of New Jersey (URHS), who plans to restore it at their Boonton yard. The New Jersey State Museum has a collection of French gifts from the boxcar.
To transport the boxcar from Kansas City to New Jersey, URHS is raising $20,000 to cover preparation, stabilization, shrink-wrapping, and transportation of the car via flatbed truck. Any additional funds will support an initial evaluation by a historic architect. You can donate or make a larger sponsorship gift here.
New York’s Forty and Eight
Cramped into narrow gauge boxcars, each stenciled with “40 Hommes/8 Chevaux,” denoting its capacity to hold either 40 men or 8 horses, “40 and 8” cars were a familiar uncomfortable mode of transportation common among the experience of every American who fought in the trenches.
Thereafter, they used “40/8” a lighthearted symbol of the unspoken horrors and shared sacrifice of combat that bound them together.
The Forty & Eight (The Society of Forty Men and Eight Horses, La Société des Quarante Hommes et Huit Chevaux) was founded in 1920 by American veterans returning from France as an “elite” arm of the American Legion.
(It became an independent and separately incorporated veteran’s organization in 1960. Membership is by invitation and open to honorably discharged veterans and honorably serving members of the United States Armed Forces.)
While most of the Merci Trains’ forty-nine 40 and 8 boxcars (there was one for each state and Washington DC/Hawaii Territory) are displayed in museums and parks across the country, five remain lost, including those representing Connecticut; Massachusetts (scrapped in the 1960s); Illinois (believed to have been abandoned and destroyed at the 1948-1949 Chicago Railroad Fair site); Nebraska (partially scrapped in 1951, the remainder converted to a shed and destroyed in 1961); and Colorado.
New York’s boxcar was originally in the care of the Grand Voiture of New York. By the mid-1950s was at Onondaga County Forty & Eight Voiture 359, a local chapter of the Forty and Eight in Syracuse, NY.
The Voiture loaned the boxcar to the Rail City Museum, which opened in Sandy Creek, Oswego County, NY on July 4, 1955. To promote the museum it was placed on display in Clinton Square in Syracuse in 1956 before returning to Rail City where it remained on display until that museum closed in 1974.
It then found its way to Oneida County Forty & Eight Voiture 92 at 5163 Judd Road in Whitesboro, NY and was stored outside behind a chain link fence until 2010 when it was restored, repainted and placed under a new pavilion.
Voiture 92 closed its doors in 2022 citing “lack of support” however, and the car remained on site as late as July 2024. According to mercitrain.org “the car will be moved to a location where it will be renovated. Once that is complete, the car should be moved to the Utica Union Station.”
If you have additional information about the status of New York’s Merci Boxcar please leave a comment below, or email John Warren.
PHOTO OF THE DAY
Misery Loves Company
As we met outside the Chapel, Scot Bobo
and I commiserated about trying to maneuver on
our brick sidewalks.
Scot is the victim of a skiing accident in Montana.
We now know personally how terrible our brick sidewalks, crosswalks
and pavements are to persons using assistive devices.
Time repair and replace our 50 year old pavements, RIOC!!
CREDIT
Illustrations, from above: New Jersey’s Merci Train boxcar in a warehouse in Missouri in ca. 2024 (provided by the United Railroad Historical Society of New Jersey); New York’s Merci Train Boxcar on display in Syracuse Clinton Square in 1956 (photo by Stanley A Gorman); New York’s boxcar in Whitesboro in 1997 (provided by MerciTrain.org); and the restored New York boxcar in its 2010-built shelter in Whitesboro (photo by John and Sue Stevens, provided by MerciTrain.org).
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated
THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
Copyright © 2024 Roosevelt Island Historical Society, All rights reserved.Our mailing address is:
rooseveltislandhistory@gmail.com
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