What is Spook-Track-Ula?
The same miniature train that pulls a million people through holiday lights every December spends October in the fog. Spook-Track-Ula is McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park’s Halloween month: after dark the Paradise & Pacific Railroad, the 15-inch-gauge line Guy Stillman gave the city in 1971, runs its loop past giant skeletons, man-eating spiders, a haunted graveyard, an alien landing, jack-o’-lantern saguaros and the occasional clown, with fog, haze, lighting and sound effects doing the rest. The 1910 carousel runs too. A $15 wristband (ages 3 and up; members $5 off) buys unlimited rides in a timed slot, pitched in the park’s words as “a little spooky, slightly eerie, a lot of fun.”
In 2026 the event grew in two directions at once. It runs every night of October, 6 to 9:30 p.m., with arrival slots at 6, 6:30, 7, 7:30 and 8, where earlier years ran a few weeks of selected nights. And it added a Haunted Train Walk Through, a jump-scare walk through parked train cars that the park plainly says is for older children and adults, and a Storybook Train Ride on the River Rambler, the park’s second train, with characters named Engineer Bones and Choo Choo Charley, which boards by the new Roundhouse and is the gentle option for anyone under six. The model railroad building is open and decorated, and Hartley’s General Store sells cider and snacks.
It is, with the Spooktacular balloon glow at Salt River Fields, one of Scottsdale’s two big family Halloween nights, and the only one you can walk to from McCormick Ranch. Tickets are online only, from September 1, and Halloween week sells out. See October in Scottsdale for the rest of the month.
How to do it
Buy early, pick a weeknight. Sales open September 1 at 8 a.m. on ActiveNet, which requires an account. The 6 p.m. slot on a Tuesday or Wednesday in the first half of October is the local’s ticket: full dark by 6:30, the train line a single trainload, the carousel empty. The last weekend and Halloween itself are a different event, with the lot full by 6 and the walkthrough queue the length of the platform.
Order of operations. Check in ten minutes before your slot, ride the train immediately, then split the party: under-sixes to the Storybook Train at the Roundhouse, older kids and adults into the Haunted Train Walk Through, regroup at the carousel, finish in the model railroad building, decorated for the month. Ninety minutes covers it; the wristband is good until 9:30.
Know the scare level. The train ride is props and fog, built for younger children. The walkthrough is the one with jump scares; the park says so, and parents of anxious seven-year-olds should take it at its word.
Parking and the drive. The park is at Scottsdale Road and Indian Bend, ten minutes north of Old Town. Its lots on Indian Bend fill on the last two weekends; overflow is the shopping center across Scottsdale Road. Early October is still in the 80s at 6 p.m., so dress for a summer evening and keep a layer in the car for Halloween week.
Make it a season. The same trains run the Holiday Lights from the Friday after Thanksgiving, with wristbands on sale October 26; the two events are the bookends of the park’s year. For the rest of the month’s haunts, from the Spooktacular balloons to Old Town’s ghost stories, see Haunted Scottsdale, and for the other kid-sized October night, the city’s Dia de los Muertos at the Civic Center.
From a $5 ride to a month of nights
The Railroad Park has run its trains through holiday lights every December since it opened in 1975; the Halloween version is much newer, and its beginnings are not well documented. The earliest Spook-Track-Ula we can place is 2019, a one-week run from October 25 to 31 with a $5 spooky train ride, a $15 fast pass, trick-or-treating in the park on Halloween and an outdoor showing of Hotel Transylvania. That same autumn a national local-government group named McCormick-Stillman its best park in the country and listed Spook-Track-Ula among the park’s annual events, so the tradition is older than our earliest listing; we could not find out by how much.
The pandemic reshaped it into the ticketed event it is now. In 2021 the park sold $15 wristbands for two 90-minute blocks, at 6 and 8 p.m., capped at 750 people each, with unlimited train and carousel rides inside the block; 2022 ran the same format with 650 per block. By 2024 it was three weeks of nights, October 11 to 31, and 2025 ran October 10 to 31 with three arrival times. The 2026 jump to all 31 nights, five slots and two new attractions follows the park’s 2025 fiftieth-anniversary rebuild, which added the 10,000-square-foot Roundhouse play building and a splash pad.
Railfair, the park’s older October tradition, is a different animal: a free daytime weekend when the Valley’s model railroad clubs set up indoor and outdoor layouts, the Scottsdale Live Steamers run their engines and the Scottsdale Railroad Museum reopens for the season. It ran the first weekend of October in 2024 and on October 4–5, 2025, when it carried the park’s Golden Jubilee, with live music and the park’s first drone light show on the anniversary of the 1975 opening. As of mid-October 2026 the park’s calendar listed Spook-Track-Ula, Holiday Lights and Noon Year’s Eve and no Railfair; whether the anniversary edition was the last, or the event has moved, we could not confirm.
Why a train park owns Halloween here
Scottsdale’s holiday calendar has been getting bigger and more corporate, and Halloween is no exception: the Spooktacular at Salt River Fields is a ticketed three-night festival. Spook-Track-Ula is the municipal version, fifteen dollars, run by the city’s parks department on a train a Paradise Valley collector built for his friends. The fog is thick and the platform crowd is the same three generations that line up in December. A ten-minute ride through the fog on a 1971 train is as close to a shared Halloween as Scottsdale has. Buy the Tuesday, ride first, and let the seven-year-old decide about the walkthrough.