On a rainy day in February 1861, hundreds of people gathered at the Great Western Railway depot in Springfield, Illinois, to bid farewell to Abraham Lincoln, the city’s most famous son, when he boarded a train to Washington to take office as US president.

Almost 146 years later, Springfield witnessed the start of another political journey on Saturday, when Barack Obama, the junior Democratic senator for Illinois, launched his bid for the presidency in a rally outside the city’s Old State Capitol building.