Intermittent rain fell on the Plains Trains and Fireworks festival in Plains, mixing Country music and liquid sunshine before eventually clearing.

Jimmy Gaddy sang during the event. Festival goer Sarah Cooper, from Terrell County, talked about what she enjoyed most about the event: “I guess it’s just seeing all the people getting into the music.”

Justin Brown, from Preston, talked about what brought him and his family to Plains. “Just fireworks.” He talked about how the highlight of the event was food at the Buffalo Caffe. When asked if there were any other highlights, he responded: “Just a good turnout, good amount of people here, especially for a little bit of Plains.”

Sargent John Harty at the Sherriff’s office gave updates on the barbeque cook-off. He told how he had helped do barbeque competitions in Plains for around three years. “This year we decided to add a public safety event to it with the proceeds from entry fees from this to go to Smith-Smarr as a donation.” He listed $200 made from entry fees for the public safety cook-off. He also mentioned a raffle: “We raffled off [an] Oklahoma Joe grill that was donated to us, didn’t cost us anything. Did really well with that.” He estimated around $600 dollars had been collected for the Smith-Smarr foundation.

He talked about the work of the organization: “Smith-Smarr is a very good organization. A lot of the money that’s raised through donations or events like their gala they just had goes back into local law enforcement agencies for tasers, body cams, individual first aid kits, things like that that we need that may not necessarily fit into the budget of the agencies.”

The train arrived in Plains before 8 pm, flooding the town with festival goers. Fireworks went off at around 9:15, with the train leaving at 9:45.