Canadian Pacific Railway Holiday Train....

Holidays are coming, holidays are coming...

Tegan, Fraser and I took a trip to down town Medicine Hat to participate in an annual community event tonight - to see the Canadian Pacific Railway Christmas holiday train, which visits over 140 communities along its network. This is a huge annual event with lots of locals turning up to the railway siding to witness the magical illuminated train with all its flashing sparkly lights. The Medicine Hat community provided free hot chocolate and cookies (as much as you liked much to the delight of Fraser) for everyone that came with donations made to the food bank. Noo, Lexi and Harry also joined us with all the children very excited, or was that Noo and myself!

After a short wait the train arrived much to our delight, just after 5pm. The main locomotive was lit up followed by four carriages carrying the Canadian Pacific name, two more carriages decorated with lights and then a carriage with a large metal section in the middle, this was positioned infront of the crowd. Then the metal side was lowered and there was Rocking Santa and his band. We were then entertained for 20 minutes by a brilliant band - Noo had a beaming smile across her face - this really felt like Christmas had arrived. Obviously we were standing on snow with temperatures about -15degrees.

At this point we were in high spirits and decided that we all deserved to go out for Pizza. So after a visit to Boston Pizza, which we all admitted was very nice it was time to drive back to Ralston with tired children, especially as it was only Tuesday night.

History:

The Holiday Train Program began in 1999 with a handful of communities and a few lights on a freight train. Today, with its hundreds of thousands of festive lights and a live show featuring well known performers, it's one of Canadian Pacific's main ambassadors in working with communities in Canada and the United States and is the only fundraiser of its kind for food banks in North America. Since the program's inception, more than 4.8 million in cash and over 2.3 million pounds of food has been collected in Canada and the United States.