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When my father drove us over the McCully Bridge each morning on our way to Punahou School in the 1950s, my brother Tony and I sometimes glanced briefly at a railroad boxcar rusting under a tree in the yard of the American Legion Hawaii clubhouse.

We never talked about how strange it was for the huge boxcar to be sitting there in the sun. In our minds, it had always been there.

We didn’t know it then but it turns out we were looking at one of the 49  that France sent to the United States and the Territory of Hawaii in 1949,  filled with gifts to say thanks for the “Friendship Train” ordinary citizens had sent to France and Italy two years earlier.

The Friendship Train included 270 railroad freight cars shipped abroad,  filled with food and emergency goods to help beleaguered Europeans  suffering in their bombed-out cities in the aftermath of World War II.

Hawaii’s Merci boxcar had been sitting by the bridge since Nov. 9, 1949, when it arrived after traveling from France to New York and then by rail across the mainland to San Francisco to be put aboard the SS President Monroe bound for Honolulu Harbor. After its arrival, a truck transported the freight car to the edge of Waikiki to be placed in the custody of the .

But over the years, the legionnaires came to view the empty box car — long divested of its cargo of gifts — as a nuisance. They welcomed the chance to get rid of it in the 1960s when the city widened McCully Street, taking away most of the freight car’s parking area. Star-Bulletin reporter Lyle Nelson quoted an unnamed American Legion official at the time saying, “We are not going to paint it. We painted it about five years ago and it cost $60.”

The Hawaiian Railway Society officially took over custody of the Merci car in 1998, storing what by then was a rusted hulk in its Ewa Beach rail yard, where it sat largely ignored until 2013 when member Glen Houlton embarked on what has turned into more than a decade-long by volunteers.

After seeing the boxcar in its deteriorated condition in 2015, Kaneohe resident Jane Mann was moved to get involved. When she became the state regent of the Daughters of the American Revolution, she made the its restoration a state DAR project.

“It was a diamond in the rough,” says Mann. “Nobody knew about it. Nobody was taking advantage of it.”

“It was very touching to think that the people of France gathered what little they had after the war to say ‘thank you,’ sending gifts as far as Hawaii.”

Gifts individual French families sent from their homes included their wedding gowns, embroidered baby clothes, paintings, stamps and flags, family heirlooms, dinner plates, sterling silver flatware, bottles of wine and paper cutouts of stars made by French schoolchildren. In one of the cars, a little French girl had cut off some of her hair to paste on her bald doll to make it presentable as a gift.

Vincent Auriol, then president of France, enclosed in each boxcar, including the one sent to Hawaii, a Sevres porcelain vase.

A young French mother sent handmade baby clothes, her note asking that they be given to mothers of newborns in Honolulu.

“The French people gave of themselves,” says Jeff Livingston, who took over management of the restoration project for the Railway Society in 2022 after Houlton died.

Livingston says the boxcar in Ewa is a reminder of how Hawaii, still a remote U.S. territory in the Pacific, was an eager part of the Friendship Train the U.S. sent to France and Italy.

Without being asked, Hawaii — even though it was facing his own post war shortages — made the largest single donation by filling two boxcars carrying 72 tons of Hawaii-grown sugar.

“These carloads of sugar represent nickels and dimes contributed by the workers on the plantations, by schoolchildren and men and women from every walk of life. This sugar, this Friendship Train, shows deeply the spirit of love of America for mankind,” said then-territorial Gov. Ingram Stainback after $11,000 was raised from individuals and another $2,000 pitched in from the Hawaii Sugar Planters Association (HSPA) to buy the sugar.

By the time the Friendship Train reached New York it had turned into three separate trains, each hauling food-laden freight cars.

Syndicated newspaper columnist Drew Pearson in his Washington Merry-Go-Round column had initiated the idea of a Friendship Train to give war-weary Americans  an uplifting  way to launch their own people-to-people  diplomacy, not wait for the diplomats and government bureaucrats to do the job.

Pearson wrote in a November 1947 column that the idea was to get aid to Europe in a hurry while “Congress dallied”— to give the people in France and Italy “a dramatic picture of American generosity by showing them that our help was not a cold deal between governments but sprang from the hearts of the American people.”

Nobody expected the European countries to reciprocate, but a railroad worker who had fought in the war decided on his own that each province in France should send a boxcar with gifts from their homes to say “merci” to the Americans.

DAR Hawaii state vice regent Laura Ingenluyff has made it her mission to find out where the gifts in Hawaii’s boxcar ended up to be able to put some of items on display to the public when the restoration is completed.

Newspaper articles in 1949 report long lines of Honolulu schoolchildren waited outside the HSPA Experiment Station on Keeaumoku Street, where the gifts from France were briefly shown to the public. After that, the presents seem to have been distributed here and there to individual Honolulu residents and organizations.

The boxcars themselves are important historically. Built from 1893 to 1895 in Lyon, France, they are called “40 &  8s,” able to transport 40 troops or eight horses. Many American soldiers were carried to the front lines in 40 & 8 cars during World War I.

Just knowing the boxcars lasted so long and did so many different jobs in France motivates Livingston to keep working on the restoration of Hawaii’s car with a group of volunteers. His friends Aaron Erickson and Mike Ingenluyff come out to Ewa Beach every weekend to do the heavy work such as replacing the boxcar’s roof, repairing the undercarriage and installing custom milled planks of wooden siding.

All of the boxcar’s nuts and bolts had rusted. It was difficult to find similar fasteners. Some of the missing train parts had to be made from scratch.

Livingston describes the original work on the boxcar as incredible craftsmanship, an honor to restore.

“I love trains,” he says. “I love to see something come back to life. I love history.  This restoration means everything to me.”

Volunteers from the DAR’s Aloha Chapter regularly show up to scrape rust from the boxcar and prime and paint it, as well as preparing mounts for the heraldic shields decorating its sides. The 40 shields represent the 40 French provinces that sent gifts to the U.S. in the boxcars.

“We are hard-working women. We are not afraid to get dirty,” says Christine Domhoff, DAR Aloha Chapter regent.

They say they are ahead of schedule, almost ready now for the rededication of the boxcar scheduled for Feb. 2, 2025.

“There are 43 Merci boxcars still in existence,” says Livingston. “I can honestly say ours was in the worst shape of all of them.”