Thousands lining the 137-mile rail route from Philadelphia to Washington braved single-digit temperatures for hours yesterday to catch a glimpse of the man who will be inaugurated as the nation’s first black president Tuesday.
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“We are here to mark the beginning of our journey to Washington,” President-elect Barack Obama declared yesterday at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station, where he embarked on a seven-hour ride along part of the historic route once taken by Abraham Lincoln.
“This is fitting because it was here, in this city, that our American journey began.
“We are here today not simply to pay tribute to our first patriots, but to take up the work that they began,” he said.
It was 9 degrees outside.
Obama’s first stop just before 1 p.m. was Wilmington, Del., where he picked up Joe Biden at the very station from which the vice president-elect commuted to his job as senator for the past 36 years.
With Biden’s help, Obama told the crowd of nearly 8,000 that he would hold government more accountable.
“To the conductors who make our trains run, and to the workers who lay down the rails, to the parents who worry how they’re going to pay next month’s bills on the commute to work, and to the children who hear the whistle of the train and dream of a better life,” he said.
“That’s who we’re fighting for. That’s who needs change.”
Sprinkling his speeches with lines borrowed from Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., Obama called for a new American Revolution and a “new Declaration of Independence” from small thinking and bigotry.
He appealed “not to our easy instincts, but our better angels” and promised to act with “fierce urgency” to address America’s problems.
Enthralled by the historic nature of his ascendancy, Obama couched his arrival in Washington as a turning point for America.
“It was here, in Delaware, that the Constitution was first ratified. It was here, in Delaware, where the first state joined our union,” he said.
“Now, it falls to us to pick ourselves up, to reach for the promise of a better day, and to do the hard work of perfecting our union once more,” he said.
And Obama purposely chose the theater of train travel to harken back to Lincoln, who took the train from Springfield, Ill., to Washington for his inauguration 148 years ago.
As they did then, Americans gathered yesterday along the rails at platforms, overpasses and bunched against chain-link fences just to wave at the slow-passing train.
People held up signs saying “Hail to the Chief!” and “Hallelujah, we did it!” And they waved tiny American flags.
Inside the smartly appointed, 1939 Pullman Standard train car, Obama, his wife, Michelle, and their daughters, Malia and Sasha, waved.
When the train stopped or slowed in small towns, Obama stepped out onto its flag-draped back porch and waved enthusiastically.
As the train lumbered out of Philly just before noon, a conductor bellowed, “Welcome aboard the 2009 inaugural train to DC.”
The throngs of people that gathered along the tracks in the frigid cold was a testament to the hopefulness Obama inspires in people and the powerful connection so many feel to a man most have never met and who just a few years ago was an obscure Illinois state legislator.
“I’m one of the hardworking nurses Obama talks about,” said Jacquelyn Canada, 52, who traveled to Philadelphia from her home in Freehold, NJ.
“It’s a special day, especially because it’s so close to Martin Luther King Day,” she said. “We’re really living their dream. It shows that everyone can have a stake and everyone can make a difference.”
“It’s history,” said Dave Owens, 30, a truck driver from Jamaica, Queens.
“But the real reason I came is for him,” he said, nodding to his 7-year-old son, also named David.
At one of their final stops, in Baltimore, where by late afternoon the mercury had risen to 20 degrees, a crowd of 40,000 huddled to hear Obama speak.
Inside the 10-car train, 41 “everyday Americans” selected by the campaign filled two cars and the Obamas visited with them between stops.
One weeping woman hugged both the future president and the future first lady.
When staffers summoned the Obamas to return to their car , the crowd on board sang “Happy Birthday” to Michelle Obama who turned 45 yesterday.
Shortly before 7 p.m., the train slowly rolled into Washington’s Union Station where hundreds of people had gathered in hopes of spying the next president.
“I just walked an hour and a half in the cold just to get a glimpse,” said Alice Green. “I was cold but I was warmed by the thought that I might be able to see him.”
The Obamas then took off by motorcade to Blair House, just across the street from the White House, where they celebrated Michelle’s birthday and will stay until the inauguration.
churt@nypost.com