(The following article by Lauren Donovan was posted on the Bismarck Tribune website on December 18.)
HARVEY, N.D. — A train trimmed in thousands of lights and loaded with nothing but Christmas cheer slipped through the vast, starlit North Dakota night.
It stopped in small towns like Harvey, where hundreds came down to the old depot siding Thursday, bundled against the settling cold, shivering in anticipation.
In the distance, finally, the train’s headlamp appeared. The whistle blew.
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“Here it comes, Mom. Here it comes!” children called out.
Like the magical Polar Express, the glowing train seemed to come from nowhere out of the darkness. The children’s faces and eyes reflected the train’s pretty lights.
The Canadian Pacific Railway Holiday Train came to a slow stop at the Harvey station. Santa Claus jumped out.
The doors on a boxcar were pulled open, revealing a stage. Within minutes, a Nashville bluegrass band hopped into the boxcar and played and sang Christmas songs, with a fiddle and a banjo to carry the tune.
Children came up close to see better and sing along, their voices piping out in the brisk winter night.
Band leader John Cowan said he’s played everywhere, but no gig is more special than nights on the Holiday Train singing “Silent Night” in the cold, his eyes closed while he listens to the voices of strangers singing with him.
Cowan and his band have been on the Holiday Train since Dec. 2, spending two weeks on board as the train traveled the Canadian Pacific’s route from Scranton, Pa., finally reaching Weyburn, Saskatchewan, Friday.
It rattled through the northern nights, past lakes and rivers from Pennsylvania to Minnesota, past the fields and the farmhouses of North Dakota, past vehicles on highways and dirt roads.
Through all those December nights, it has been a mirage of Christmas flashing by in the darkness.
“It’s romantic and beautiful,” Cowan said. “In the entertainment world you get jaded, but the thing about this, it’s not like anything else you ever do.”
The Holiday Train is Canadian Pacific’s way of saying “merry Christmas” and giving something back. At every stop, it donates cash to local food pantries — $1,500 in Harvey — and encourages people who come out to bring a food donation.
In four years, the trains have generated $1 million and 213 tons of food for the hungry.
It is fitting for a company that, more than anything, carries grain out of the heartland to give food back, company spokeswoman Laura Baenen said.
Towns along the way, like Harvey, have made a celebration out of the Holiday Train stop, with music and food for those who wait.
Harvey is a railroad town, with 90 conductors and engineers scheduled out from the depot there. Trains are part of its lifeblood.
The stop is short and sweet as a sugar cookie.
In half an hour, the stage door is pulled across the front of the boxcar and the Holiday Train is clattering down the track again, bound from Harvey to its next stop at Minot and on to Portal, where it would stop overnight.
It’s a two-hour trip to Minot through the back yards of towns like Martin, Anamoose, Drake, Balfour and Velva.
All along, people are stopped in the small towns and at the rural railroad crossings on gravel roads to watch the twinkling train roll by. They flash headlights and honk car horns in greeting.
The band and small crew travel in the historical elegance of antique business cars. The cars were owned by railroad executives in the early 1900s, the ghostly smoke of their cigars ingrained deep into the grain of the wood.
The cars are lined in burnished walnut, with heavy brass fixtures, brocade window coverings and thick carpets. There is a dining room and a chef on the Holiday Train, too.
The last car has a porch on the back, the type that presidents stepped onto to make speeches on campaign whistle stops in years gone by.
From there, from the last car looking out to where the Holiday Train already has been, the northern night expands until the stars and the half moon are all the sky can hold and the lights of Harvey and all the little towns grow tiny in the distance.
For them, the fleeting magic of the train is already a memory as it rushes toward the children up the line.