>>1271983The last visit by the Queen to Northern Ireland involved her being transported by a heritage railway's rolling stock to officially open a train station.
Well, at least that made sence. They put a Royal Train header board onto the steam locomotive hauling the train, and the Queen just sat in one of the open carriages which the RPSI operates for their rail tours by steam locomotive in Ireland.
Everything else was by Range Rover convoy escorted by police.
The President of Ireland used to use an Enterprise trainset for official travel across Ireland for official events, but that has since stopped since NIR became pretty unhappy with a trainset being taken out of Belfast-Dublin service just to have a mostly empty train take the Irish head of state to some place.
The Berlin S-Bahn has a "Panorama" train, which is basically an EMU modified to have huge windows. They mostly use it for special events, but when the Queen last did a state visit to Germany, she was taken around Berlin in that train.
Railways are pretty good options for carrying VIPs. Rail lines are frequently secured with barriers of some kind to prevent people from getting onto the lines, and trains can often be very "normal", at least when they're on the move. It's not obviously clear if a VIP is on board or not. Plus, a VIP train can be scheduled into normal traffic, reducing disruption. Travel by road basically means that a convoy needs to be set up, and with a convoy, you either need rolling road blocks, or you need to totally shut down a road in advance, while also making sure nothing is in the way of the convoy.
