A model of the perturbed complex Toda chain (PCTC) to describe the dynamics of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) N-soliton train trapped in an applied combined exteal potential consisting of both a weak harmonic and tilted periodic component is first developed. Using the developed theory, the BEC N-soliton train dynamics is shown to be well approximated by 4N coupled nonlinear differential equations, which describe the fundamental interactions in the system arising from the interplay of amplitude, velocity, centre-of-mass position, and phase. The simplified analytic theory allows for an efficient and convenient method for characterizing the BEC N-soliton train behaviour. It further gives the critical values of the strength of the potential for which one or more localized states can be extracted from a soliton train and demonstrates that the BEC N-soliton train can move selectively from one lattice site to another by simply manipulating the strength of the potential.