CPKC Holiday Train - Baton Rouge stop
CPKC Yard
Baton Rouge
Dec. 3; the holiday train will stop in multiple cities through Dec. 18
Despite it still being about 60 degrees last week, Christmas spirit has landed in Baton Rouge. People in the city are making their way to various holiday light shows, sometimes driving an hour or more, but the CPKC Holiday Train comes to us.
The Holiday Train, by Canada Pacific Kansas City railway company, is Christmas-themed, complete with holiday lights and one train car with a decorated stage for performing artists to put on a free traveling concert at each of the many stops. The concerts are meant to bring the community together and help raise money/solicit donations for local food banks. Last night, the Holiday Train made stops in Baton Rouge, Gonzales and Laplace with Dylan Marlowe and Emily Ann Roberts as the artists, each concert was about 30 minutes.
The holiday train stops in CPKC crossings and train yards, not a typical venue for a music event, but they pulled it off well. The sound system was good, the train was decked out, there was plenty of parking, and the event attracted a good cross section of the city.
But the venue comes with its own challenges. It’s a train yard, so people are standing in a gravel field. One of the websites advertising the event bizarrely sent me and at least a few others to the wrong trainyard, and when we backtracked, we got blocked in by other trains crossing the track. For safety reasons, a large chainlink fence separates the yard from the train track.
Over 200 people were in attendance at the Baton Rouge stop which started at 4:30 p.m., many of whom were families with young kids, and a fence like that can obscure the view for many of those kids. By Louisiana standards, it was a cold night (low 40s) which meant that they had to stop and tune a couple of times.
“When you get out in the cold, the guitars don’t stay in tune very well,” Marlowe explained during a tuning break.
Still, the unconventional venue was a cool novelty experience.
Marlowe and Roberts are both country music singers. Roberts was a contestant on the Voice during high school, placing second on season nine in 2015. Marlowe gained fame in the early 2020s through a viral TikTok reimagining Olivia Rodrigo’s “Driver’s License” as a country song.
Roberts and Marlowe each performed a set before singing some Christmas music together. Marlowe confessed to being nervous about playing Christmas music – it’s not a genre he’s ever performed before, and this was his first stop on the train performing this set. But they chose their songs well, so it wasn’t a far cry from the music they were performing before. The two artists sang “Christmas in Dixie” and “Run Rudolph Run.”
These probably aren’t songs familiar to the younger members of the audience, but it felt fitting for the set and for these artists. Many of the parents holding kids brought their kids closer to the stage during these songs and started swaying to the music.
At public events, there’s always a balance one has to strike with mass appeal and practicality. It would have been nice to have the train stop in Baton Rouge after work hours so more people could have gone, but they had other stops to make that night. In the future, it would be cool to have vendors or other activities in the train yard so the event could be longer, but that requires staff and money. As it stands, the CPKC train experience is a neat, yet brief, moment to pause and enjoy a free event to get into the holiday spirit. You just have to brave the cold and train traffic to be there.
