The Last Pumpkin Train of the Year Leaves Woodstown This Weekend

WOODSTOWN — Somewhere in a quiet corner of Salem County today, a short train is going to ease out of a little station, cross a creek, and carry a few cars full of kids out to a field to pick a pumpkin. It will not make the news anywhere else. It is, by any measure that matters, one of the best things happening in South Jersey this weekend.

They call it the Pumpkin Patch Flyer, and it runs on the Woodstown Central Railroad out of South Woodstown Station on Alloway-Woodstown Road. This Saturday and Sunday are the last two days of the season for it — eight days spread across October, and after this weekend the pumpkins and the whistle go back in the barn until next fall. If you’ve been meaning to take the kids, consider this your reminder that “next weekend” has run out.

Three trains a day, one pumpkin each

Here’s what you get, and I’d argue it’s a small miracle of simplicity in a world that keeps trying to sell our children something flashier. The train leaves three times a day — ten in the morning, half past noon, and three in the afternoon — and runs about 18 scenic miles in all, roughly nine miles out and nine miles back, with about 45 minutes in the middle at a spot called Fenwick Grove. Out there, along Fenwick Creek, there are fall games and activities, cider and donuts for sale, and a pumpkin for every rider to carry home. When the schedule allows, the whole thing is pulled by a historic steam locomotive, old No. 9, the kind of machine most kids today have only ever seen in a picture book. The round trip runs about an hour and forty-five minutes. Tickets start at $35. Parking’s free.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. No screens. No app. No line for a photo op with a costumed character. Just a train, a creek, a field, and a pumpkin — the kind of afternoon my grandparents would have recognized instantly and my own kids will remember long after they’ve forgotten whatever was trending the week it happened.

I think there’s something worth noticing in the fact that this still exists at all. Short-line railroads like the one running through Woodstown are holdovers from an older South Jersey, back when rail stitched together the farm towns of Salem and Gloucester counties and moved the tomatoes and the glass and the people who grew and made them. Most of those lines are gone, torn up or paved over or swallowed by brush. That a working stretch of track down here still fires up a steam engine on an October weekend to haul families to a pumpkin patch is a small act of preservation dressed up as a hayride. Somebody has to keep the engine running, keep the station open, keep the tradition alive one autumn at a time. They do it, and most of us never think about the effort it takes.

That a working stretch of track down here still fires up a steam engine on an October weekend to haul families to a pumpkin patch is a small act of preservation dressed up as a hayride.Max Cedar

Before you go

A few honest notes, because a good neighbor tells you the whole thing: the railroad says the ride is not wheelchair accessible, and only registered service animals are allowed aboard. You’ll want to arrive about half an hour early — boarding starts roughly 15 minutes before the train pulls out — and the cider and donuts at Fenwick Grove aren’t included in the ticket, so bring a few dollars. Light snacks and non-alcoholic drinks are welcome on board.

But those are logistics, and logistics aren’t the point. The point is that for one more weekend, you can hand a kid in Salem County the experience of climbing aboard a real train, rattling out through the fields, and coming home holding a pumpkin they picked themselves. In a few weeks it’ll be cold and the field will be bare and the engine will be quiet. Not yet, though. Not this weekend. This weekend, the Flyer still runs.

Based on reporting from Woodstown Central Railroad and PhillyVoice.