What is Holiday Lights at the Railroad Park?
McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park is Scottsdale’s most beloved public space — thirty acres in McCormick Ranch built around a 15-inch-gauge railroad, a 1910 carousel, a presidential Pullman car, and a steam locomotive, drawing about a million visitors a year. Every December since the park opened in 1975, the Paradise & Pacific Railroad has run its miniature trains through the holiday lights, and the display has grown into the city’s defining seasonal tradition: more than a million lights, thirty-plus scenes along the ten-minute loop, Santa and the Grinch on the platform, and s’mores from the general store.
The formula is simple and hasn’t needed changing. A $15 wristband (ages 3 and up) buys unlimited train and carousel rides from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m.; the model-railroad building opens its club layouts; the Pullman car and the Magma steam engine glow under the lights. Families who rode it as children bring their own, which is why the weekend slots sell out within days of the October on-sale.
The 2026 run — November 27 to December 30, closed December 24–25 — introduces timed entry, an admission that the tradition had outgrown its own lines.
Doing it without the lines
Buy on the on-sale day. Wristbands go on sale in late October through the city’s ActiveNet system; the Friday and Saturday slots in the two weeks before Christmas sell out first. Weeknights in early December are the local’s choice — quiet, cool, and fully lit by 5:45.
Take the first train. Arrive at the slot’s start, ride the train immediately, then the carousel, then the model-railroad building — the reverse of what most families do. The train loop is ten minutes and the platform line builds all evening.
Santa and s’mores. Santa holds court on set nights (check the schedule); the Grinch wanders. S’mores kits ($8) at Hartley’s General Store roast at the fire pits and sell out on busy nights. Bring a jacket — December nights in the park drop into the 40s, and the train is open-air.
The Noon Year’s Eve finale, December 31 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., is the family-friendly countdown that ends the season.
Parking: the park’s lots on Indian Bend fill on weekends; the McCormick Ranch shopping center across Scottsdale Road absorbs the overflow. Old Town and Scottsdazzle are ten minutes south for dinner before or after.
A park built from two men’s trains
The Railroad Park is the product of an unusual double gift. Guy Stillman, a rail enthusiast with a private 15-inch-gauge railroad on his Paradise Valley property, offered the whole railroad to Scottsdale in 1971 if the city would build a park for it; the McCormick family, whose ranch became the master-planned community around it, donated the land. The city added the Roald Amundsen — a Pullman private car that had carried Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower — and, in 1977, a 1907 Baldwin steam locomotive from the Magma Arizona Railroad. The park opened October 4, 1975, and by the first December the train was running through lights.
For decades the display was a modest, homemade affair, and that was its charm; the 2017 rebuild scaled it to a million lights and themed scenes without losing the miniature-railroad intimacy. The 2025 50th-anniversary investments — the indoor Roundhouse play building, a splash pad, a renovated playground — made the park a year-round destination, and the holiday run remains its peak.
Why the trains matter
Scottsdale’s holiday calendar has gotten bigger and glossier — the Christmas at the Princess production, Scottsdazzle on the canal — but the Railroad Park’s lights are the tradition with roots. The trains are the same ones a Paradise Valley collector ran for his friends in the 1960s; the carousel is older than the city; the platform crowd is three generations deep. In a city that reinvents itself every decade, a ten-minute ride through the lights on a train from 1971 is as close to a shared childhood as Scottsdale has.