WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President-elect Barack Obama's January 17 train trip from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Washington is intended to make the inauguration the most open and accessible in history. But it is also presenting the U.S. Secret Service with security problems. Miles and miles and miles of them.
In addition to the well-publicized "whistle stops" in Philadelphia; Wilmington, Delaware; and Baltimore, Maryland, the Presidential Inauguration Committee says the public will have the opportunity to view the train at other locations along its 137-mile route.
But the committee has not indicated where those sites will be, and the Secret Service has yet to release what security restrictions will be in place.
Security experts say the train ride presents traditional threats to the VIPs on board, as well as countless buildings, homes and warehouses along the route. And there are non-traditional vulnerabilities: scores of bridges and tunnels that could be sabotaged.
And, two environmental groups have warned, terrorists could take a page from al Qaeda's playbook, using existing infrastructure, in this case chemical plants along the route, as an attack method.
In a letter to the Secret Service, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth wrote that they were worried that security efforts focused on the Obama entourage "might not extend to the larger community which may suffer serious consequences in case of even one moderately successful terrorist release of ultrahazardous chemicals."
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