New Catholic Children’s Audio Programming Light On Drama, High On Life Lessons

The recently released podcast On the Night Train from the Merry Beggars and Relevant Radio bills itself as “an audio mystery adventure for the whole family”, but like so much of children’s entertainment over the last 30 years, it could more accurately be called “young children’s audio entertainment that adults will be able to tolerate.”

Night Train is a fully-voiced audio drama starring the characters of 10-year-old Paul (Noah Bush) and 12-year-old Edith (Liliana Renee Rentaria) about a great train race between the Night Train run by George Pullman’s company and Webster Wagner’s The Midnight Express.

You wouldn’t know it from listening to the show or the credits, whose Catholic parent company, Relevant Radio, has a tagline “Bringing Christ to the world through media”, but Night Train appears to be a work of historical fiction. George Pullman and Webster Wagner were real historical figures and train operators who pioneered the idea of “sleeping cars” on trains and had a real-life rivalry, but I could find no historical documentation of a great train race between the two.

One of the commenters on their Apple podcasts page said that it reminds them of Adventures in Odyssey, which is a long-running Christian children’s radio program. This is likely the goal as that program is, like this one, targeted towards parents who want to find entertainment for their children that both entertains while teaching them moral lessons. Another similarity in the programs is that the voice direction for most characters is an exaggerated voice that’s either a little too eager to teach in the case of adults, and a little too enthusiastic in the case of the children, who it appears, are always seeking to do the right thing.

But it wasn’t those elements alone that drag down the program’s overall commitment to quality; it’s the fact that it attempts to make the show both a moral lesson and an edutainment lesson to boot. The entire first episode, in fact, feels like train travel boosterism with lessons on what to do on a train, a history of trains at the time, and how to be safe on trains.

One of the main moral lessons is in emphasizing how you should always work slow and steady and carefully and honestly. Here’s a quote from the first episode by the owner of the Night Train, George Pullman. “Mr Wagner doesn’t care for his passengers or crew. He does the bare minimum. He’s willing to go faster than my train ever will. Wagner is willing to go as fast as they possibly can and they have more accidents more frequently. I try to keep it slow and steady.”

Somewhat ironically, the real-life George Pullman, although he is lionized by the conservative programmers of the show because of capitalism, became a villain of labor in a railroad strike in the late 1800s.

To sum up the show, its drama is very low stakes and there’s never much of a sense of danger or harm to the children despite a train explosion at the end of the first episode and the anger of a train conductor in the third episode for them being stowaways. Be prepared to hear long dialogues about how exciting or wonderful everything is between the two children who get along better than any brother or sister that I’ve ever met. The parental figures are saints and always look after their children and there are enough friendly characters on the train to keep the children happy which means that adults listening to the show will feel their own children will be in safe hands for a half-hour.

One more thing, the phrase “the night train” is repeated excitedly about 100 times an episode, so there’s that also. Recommended only for parents with younger children who have a desire to impart education and biblical morality into their kids cleverly through entertainment programming.

Three episodes have been released so far and new episodes are released Sundays at 6pm CT.