CPR's decorated Holiday Train. -- Photos courtesy of CPR

Brightly lit holiday festivities

Bringing Christmas lights, Christmas music, big-name entertainment and a visit by Santa to 70 small towns, big cities and isolated railway communities, the Canadian Pacific Railway Holiday Train next week starts its annual journey across Canada.

Decked out with a big Christmas tree on the locomotive and 200,000 LED lights on its freight cars, the train will present two free rail-side shows in the Toronto area:

The first is at 8:15 p.m. on Monday Dec. 4, in the downtown Distillery District; the second is at 10:15 p.m. the same evening at Nashville -- that's Nashville, Ont., a tiny hamlet on Nashville Rd., just west of Hwy. 27 in the City of Vaughan.

There's no admission fee for the shows, just bring a donation of food or cash for local food banks. Since the CPR sent out the first Holiday Train in 1999, the train has collected 600,000 kilos of food and $2.4 million in cash for food banks in Canada and the northern U.S. All the donations go to food banks in the communities where they are collected.

There are really two Holiday Trains. The one that stops in Toronto originates at Montreal, and from Toronto heads north through Parry Sound and Sudbury then west to Thunder Bay and Winnipeg,across the Prairies and the Rockies to Port Moody, B.C.

The second train travels CPR lines in Southern Ontario and the Northern U.S. It starts in Pennsylvania, goes north to Montreal, then to Hamilton and through Southwestern Ontario to Detroit and the U.S. Midwest to North Portal, Sask.

With a cast of U.S. entertainers, the second train has Ontario stops and concerts scheduled for Dec. 4 at 8 p.m. at the CPR Kinnear Yard, opposite Gage Park in Hamilton, and on Dec. 5 at 5:45 p.m. in Cambridge, at 8 p.m. in Woodstock and 9:45 p.m. in London.

GOOD OLD DAYS

Performers on both trains travel in old-fashioned private cars, the kind that royalty, prime ministers and millionaires used to enjoy in the good old days.

Musicians will roll into towns across Ontario on board the Holiday Train on Dec. 4.

At show stops, a crew throws up a pre-fab stage at the door of a car with a light and sound system. Master of ceremonies Randy Marsh introduces Santa and the entertainers. On the Canadian train, they're led by Wide-Mouth Mason and Lisa Brokop, country and blues stars who will have copies of their CDs and DVDs for sale.

In Toronto, Mayor David Miller and Gail Nyberg, executive director of the Daily Bread Food Bank, are expected to be on hand to welcome donations. At Nashville, Mayor-elect Linda Jackson, of Vaughan, will probably be there. Sure to be on hand is Peter Wixon, of the Vaughan Food Bank, which feeds 1,500 people daily.

For information on the CPR and the train, go to the website -- cpr.ca -- click on holiday train. For more information, contact CPR Public Relations at 1-800-766-7912.

To get to the Distillery District, it's a good idea to take the TTC since parking will probably be difficult. Go to King St. E. and Parliament St. and go south on Parliament past Front St. E. to Mill St. The train is scheduled to stop on the tracks just south of 55 Mill St. To get to the stop in Vaughan, drive up Hwy. 27 for 7.8 km north from Hwy. 7 to traffic lights at Nashville Rd. Go left (west) on Nashville Rd. for 2 km to the CPR crossing at the edge of Nashville, near an old grain elevator. Parking may be limited.