Pullen Park celebrates new electric train with weekend family festival

Pullen Park’s new electric train is drawing the spotlight this weekend, with Raleigh turning the upgrade into a three-day family festival Friday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. The celebration at Pullen Amusements includes live music, a train craft, railway safety activities and story time in the caboose, with tickets priced from $6 to $10 and sold digitally through RecLink.

The train itself began operating April 1, giving Raleigh a cleaner and lower-maintenance version of one of the city’s most familiar attractions. The fully electric engine no longer needs a fuel stop and instead charges overnight like an electric car, a practical change that matters as much to park operations as it does to the ride experience. Raleigh’s old 2015 CP Huntington propane locomotive was also listed as surplus for auction, underscoring that this was a full equipment changeover, not a cosmetic refresh.

For families, the train remains one of the easiest ways to spend part of a weekend at a Raleigh institution. Pullen Park is North Carolina’s first public park, the fifth oldest operating amusement park in the United States and the 16th oldest in the world. The train is a one-third-size, near-replica of the C.P. Huntington locomotive, and riders must be 42 inches tall to ride alone. Younger children can ride with a parent or guardian, and both need tickets.

That makes the upgrade especially visible to longtime Raleigh families who have treated Pullen Park as a default stop for birthdays, grandparents’ visits and low-cost outings near downtown. Richard Stanhope Pullen donated the land in 1887, and the park still carries that legacy in attractions like the historic Gustave A. Dentzel Carousel, pedal boats and kiddie boats. This weekend’s celebration gives regulars a chance to see a familiar landmark with new machinery underneath it.

The train rollout also fits into a larger round of work at the park. Raleigh reopened amusements on April 1 while construction continued on the Lake Howell shoreline improvement project, which is scheduled from February through August 2026 and is expected to finish in the fall. The city says the project will strengthen and protect the shoreline, improve safety and improve accessibility around the lake. Pedal boats will remain unavailable until spring 2027, so the new electric train is one of the first visible signs of how Raleigh is updating Pullen Park for the next generation without losing the draw that made it a local landmark in the first place.