It’s Not The CTA Holiday Train But . . .
Here’s the Canadian Pacific Railway’s holiday train pulling into Tomah, Wisconsin, this week on its way from the East Coast to Minneapolis and beyond. (Spotted in Pingree Grove, Illinois, on December 5th.)
Starting in 1999, the CPR runs a Holiday Train along its main line during the months of November and December. The Holiday Train celebrates the holiday season and collects donations for community food banks and hunger issues. The Holiday Train also provides publicity for Canadian Pacific and a few of its customers.
Each train has a box car stage for entertainers who are traveling along with the train. Artists such as Johnny Reid, Tracey Brown, Melanie Doane, The Odds, Valdy, The Brothers Dube, Sydney Grigg and Willy Porter have been part of the festivities.
The train is a freight train, but also pulls vintage passenger cars which are used as lodging/transportation for the entertainers.
Only entertainers and CP employees are allowed to board the train. Since its launch in 1999, the Holiday Train program has raised close to $6.4 million CAD and about 2.6 million pounds of food for North American food banks. All donations collected in a community remain in that community for distribution.
In 2011 there were two trains, covering Canada and the United States Northeast and Midwest. Each Holiday Train is about 1,000 feet in length with brightly decorated rail cars, including a modified box car that has been turned into a traveling stage for performers. They are each decorated with hundred of thousands of LED Christmas lights.
For 2012, both the Canadian and United States versions of the Holiday Train began their tours on Wednesday, November 28, 2012. Their progress, as well as three EMD GP38-2 locomotives maintained in the Delaware & Hudson paint scheme, can be monitored on the Heritage Units tracking site.
Also from Wikipedia:
“Major filming for the 1976 movie Silver Streak, a fictional comedy tale of a murder-infested train trip from Los Angeles to Chicago, was done on the CPR, mainly in the Alberta area with station footage at Toronto’s Union Station. The train set was so lightly disguised as the fictional ‘AMRoad’ that the locomotives and cars still carried their original names and numbers, along with the easily identifiable CP Rail red-striped paint scheme.”
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See also:
* The Holiday Train Is The Best Damn Thing The CTA Does.
* KLM’s Boom Chicago Holiday Flight.
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Comments welcome.
Posted on December 14, 2012