On November 29th I will be riding on the CP Rail holiday train. 
I hope I like the journey from the  CP General Yard Office in Scarborough across to Lambton Yard.

CP is collecting food to give the food to local food banks.  
I will be collecting food for people who can't afford to buy food. I hope my food gets donated and I hope people get a good meal.
That's why I like donating for the holiday train. 
Each and every year since I was 2 or 3 we've collected food up and down our street, but this is the first time we've ever been on the holiday train. We send flyers up and down our street and ask for donations. So this year we are going to bring all the food we collected up and down our street to the holiday train to donate.
I think donating food is a great way to give people who have literally nothing more food. 
I am very excited about donating food and I want to hear how much food they raise this time.
CP has been collecting food for 15 years now. 
They've collected so much food and it's so big of a number I can't remember.
I looked it up and CP has collected 3.3 million pounds of food.
You can donate food and you will fill another person's bucket somewhere and they will be happy with a meal.  
Here is a link to the book How Full Is Your Bucket: For Kids:

Print off eight pages of CP Holiday Train themed colouring and activity pages. 
Once the sheets have been coloured, have kids use them to decorate boxes to be filled with donations to your food bank. It's a great activity to teach kids about the importance of giving before they attend the event.   Here is the link to colouring pages:

I can't wait for my ride on the CP Holiday Train.  
I will tell you all about my ride after it's done and I will take lots of pictures.

Canadian Pacific had a big ceremony on Remembrance Day because 100 years ago soldiers fought in World War One. 
The ceremony was at CP's Memorial Square in Calgary.  The square was built to remember the start of the war.
I think CP had a great ceremony on Remembrance Day.  I hope to be at that celebration one day. 
It's cool how CP carried the soldiers to the boats and they go on the boats to go to Europe.  
Here is a picture of some of the soldiers leaving for war on a train from London, Ontario:

I found this information on CP's Website:
During the First and Second World Wars almost every soldier was transported to a training location and to the point of departure for Europe by train — CP Rail. 
The ships that carried troops across the ocean were often also owned by CP.  


THE JAIL AND HOSPITAL CARS
CP even had jail cars and hospital cars.  The jail car sounds cool. I have never seen one before and I wonder what it is like inside a hospital car - what they do and what they see.  Here is a picture of the inside of a hospital car:

My two great-grandfathers both fought in World War Two.  I wonder if they took a CP train.

You can read more about CP and the war effort, and see more photos here:

I wrote a story about a boy who sees a train.  In the story the boy is 7 because I will be 7 soon.  On each page there is a CP locomotive.  See if you can find it.  I hope you like my story.

We went up to the train control tower. It is really high up.  

I saw lots of CP locomotives, like this one:
A locomotive has 4400 horse power per engine.
There can be as many as 5 locomotives on a train.
The first one has the Engineer and Conductor in it, and the rest are controlled by remote control.  That is so cool!

   I also met Tony Marquis, a CP Vice President.  His first job was a GO-      
   train driver.  He has 6 brothers and sisters and they've all worked in 
   the train business.  So did his dad. Tony said trains are in his blood. I 
   think they are in mine too.  










I also met Tina who worked for CN Rail for 20 years and CP for 2 years.  She told me  It can take a train more than 2 kilometres to stop when it is going really fast.  But it depends on how heavy the train is.

And Salem flew in all the way from Calgary to meet me. 
We talked a lot about rail safety and not walking on the tracks or putting coins on the tracks.  
Here she is showing me a map of CP and other railways too.

Kurt drove us around. He is in charge of maintaining tracks from Havelock, Ontario to Toronto, Mississagua and Ottawa.  He has 26 vehicles in total. Including a CP truck that's new that cuts trees and a 'air forced one', a truck that blows the snow off the tracks. Kurt was really nice. 
Here is one of the brand new trucks CP Rail has.  Kurt was very excited to show me it. It has really awesome lasers in it to make sure the tracks are safe:

My favourite railroad crossing is Wilkinson crossing, near our cottage.  A very nice man I met at the CP Yard named Drew gave me a special book with my name on it.  It has lots of charts and train information in it.  It is called a sub time table.  It is cool.















I met so many nice people at the CP Yard.  Everyone I met was very friendly.  I had one of the best days of my whole life.  Thank you CP Rail!