Dominick Magliaro

Minot Air Force Base

The Canadian Pacific Railroad’s Christmas train was a wonderful idea for charity that was poorly executed by the city of Minot. There was adequate information about the event and it was for a good cause.

However, the area in which the city had setup for viewing the train was a severe disappointment. The area by Central and Main is only about 150 feet wide, so that bottlenecks the audience to remain at that narrow distance. Then, the city placed trailers on the street for the event, narrowing the area and reducing the view further. Finally, the beautiful city tree was smack dab in the middle of where the train stopped, so if you were standing behind the tree you could not see anything. Basically, the only viewing area for the whole city was an area 150 feet wide by the 40 ft deep that was in front of the tree. The view might have been improved if the parking lot to the left of the Old Soo Depot was vacant to widen the viewing area. But, no the city allowed parking in the lot which filled up hours before the event.

Now enough of the griping, some ways this could be improved upon would be closing the parking lot by the Old Soo Depot and using the space to park the trailers on the West side of the lot, expanding the viewing area by an area of 100 x 200 feet. Additionally, the cable barrier in the lot would have to be taken down as I witnessed several people fall over it as they tried to find a better view. My three year old and eight year old had no chance to see the train, what a disappointment.