Why he matters
Scottsdale’s landmark parks mostly came out of engineering or ballot-box campaigns. The Railroad Park came out of generosity, and Guy Stillman supplied the half of it that moves. His mother and stepfather gave the ground; he gave the trains, and without them the land would have been one more lawn.
Fifty years on, the park still runs on his idea: a real, rideable railroad at 5/12 scale, cheap enough for any family, looping a park that has not been upscaled or priced out.
Where to find his mark today
McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park. The park at Scottsdale Road and Indian Bend, where his Paradise & Pacific still circles 30 acres.
Holiday Lights. The December light run, which the trains have made every year since the park opened.
Seeing it for yourself
Go on a weekday morning for the easy version: short lines, a $3 ride on the full loop, and time for the carousel and the model-train museum. Look for the Roald Amundsen, a Pullman private car that carried Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower, which came to the park alongside Stillman’s gift.
To understand where the land came from, ride or walk the McCormick Ranch lakes and paths north from the park, and read the 1970s chapter for the decade the park and the master-planned community grew up together.
The full story
Guy Stillman was the son of Anne “Fifi” Potter Stillman McCormick, who with her husband Fowler McCormick ran a ranch of roughly 4,200 acres across central Scottsdale (their story). Stillman’s own passion was rail. On his Paradise Valley property he ran a private 15-inch-gauge railroad, the Paradise & Pacific, built at 5/12 scale with two steam locomotives, the kind of thing a collector runs for his friends.
In 1967 the McCormicks donated 100 acres of the ranch to Scottsdale with one condition: it had to become a park for everyone. Stillman’s offer made the park something more. In 1971 he told the city it could have the whole railroad if it would build a park for it, chartered the Scottsdale Railroad & Mechanical Society, and began moving track, rolling stock and locomotives onto the donated land. Four years of volunteer track-laying followed.
McCormick Railroad Park opened on October 4, 1975, with free rides, games, music and a Wild West shootout, and by the first December the trains were running through holiday lights. In 1996 the city renamed it McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park, which was only fair. The records on Stillman’s life outside the railroad are thin, but the park is the kind of legacy that does not need a biography: a train from 1971, still running, with three generations on the platform.