Holiday train to make annual trek across Minnesota, starting Wednesday

A spectacle of light and sound will be riding the rails across Minnesota starting this week. Canadian Pacific’s annual Holiday Train is headed back to the state.

The big train features brightly decorated boxcars traveling across Canada and the northern United States, with musical performances and food donation collections at stops along the way.

It’ll be in Rochester, Owatonna, Waseca and Janesville in southern Minnesota on Wednesday, then head up along the Mississippi River later this week, arriving in Hastings on Saturday night.

It’ll be in the Twin Cities metro area for the weekend before heading northwest. It’s scheduled to make its last Minnesota stop at Elbow Lake on Dec. 15 at 4:15 p.m. before heading to North Dakota.

Canadian Pacific — now known as Canadian Pacific Kansas City, or CPKC — says the Holiday Train stops raise money, food and awareness for community food banks.

This will be the 25th anniversary of the Holiday Train, which Canadian Pacific says has raised more than $22 million and delivered more than 5 million pounds of food for community food banks across North America.

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