New Hope Railroad — Attraction in New Hope

This is solely for their Halloween event, No Hope After Dark 2023

The short, short review, don’t waste your time and money. You will be disappointed. For those who want details…

We went to No Hope After Dark Halloween train ride and haunted attraction at the New Hope Railroad. Their website made it sound absolutely awesome stating there would be a full festival with music, food trucks, and a scare maze.

The station is well decorated for the holiday with skeletons all over the place. There was an initial, brief maze you had to go through to board the train. That was awesome with narrow corridors and twists and turns and people jumping out of blind spots with freaky lighting and all….expectations were high.

The train ride is just a boring train ride. The cars aren’t decorated for Halloween at all. They could at least play some spooky music or something during the ride….nothing, but okay, because we’re going to a festival!

We depart the train and enter the festival area, and it’s the saddest thing. There are no food trucks. It’s a Saturday night and no real food options. There appeared to be one table where they had some concessions but we were told by other guests they didn’t really have anything impressive…like no hot chocolate or cider and no real festival “foods” like fries, sandwiches, elephant ears. we had skipped dinner for food trucks. The one table they had for concessions, they didn’t even have any lighting there and no obvious lists or posting of food options but it appeared very sad and limited. We had skipped dinner for the food trucks…but whatever, we still have the scare maze, right?

It starts well as there was this awesome hostess that would greet you and yell and scream and make lots of jokes (she was wonderful). The maze starts in a large cargo trailer and that was fun with twists and turns setup for decent jump scares but you get outside into the maze and it’s literally just string guiding you through an open path where you see actors lined up right next to the path. Like it’s all open air, so you basically see all of the spots where someone will try to scare you and will fail. The entire maze took about five minutes. I’m not exaggerating.

We then rushed back to the train as we didn’t want to get trapped at the pitiful place for another 30 min. FYI, there was a band and maybe two to three very small fire pits. The band sounded pretty good, but we weren’t going to stick around for them. They deserved better too as of it had been anything like a true festival, which they had probably been told to expect, people would have been sticking around buying some food and enjoying themselves after having been thoroughly scared in the ”scare maze.”

The entire train ride back consisted of huge groups of strangers complaining and confirming that we all felt ripped off.…and everyone did, due to the price and the impressive claims on the website versus the sad reality. Tickets for coach are $58 and of course there was a $10 “processing fee” for our order. So for two, we spent about $126. We also had traveled more than 3 hours RT to try something “different.” For a few dollars more we could have done a solid local haunted attraction offering hours of scary fun and better food options and saved time and money on gas.

No offense to the actors/employees, they did their best, but I wrote this long and negative review to warn people….don’t waste your money, you will be disappointed!

My frustration lies with the higher ups who are running things as they have to know the effort and what they’ve actually put together is pretty sad compared to the claims about the experience. I’ve never been more disappointed in a holiday-themed event. We went from talking about checking out their Christmas-themed event on the train ride out to agreeing we will never return to the New Hope Railroad.

If you search for “Halloween” in their reviews you’ll see they have been disappointing customers at this time of year for several years….if only...

A group of 4 of us went to the No Hope After Dark attraction, we travelled about an hour and half for one of the worse haunted attractions we have ever been to. Let’s start with the train ride, we got first class tickets that allowed us to be in the fancier car, which was not worth it. The bartender was extremely nice but he had nothing to offer us, he had Sierra Mist, water, orange juice and apple juice for non alcoholic beverages or beer and vodka for alcoholic beverages, not much to pick from. The “snacks” were cold soggy pretzels from the Philadelphia pretzel company. The ride was ok, took about 10 minutes to get to our “undisclosed” location. We were under the impression from the website that there would be a haunted maze along with food trucks (notice the plural) with live music. Upon getting off the train we were greeted with a small clearing that had a couple of fire pits and one musician playing acoustic and a tent that was serving warm wine. You had to cross the train tracks to get to where the haunted “maze” was and was greeted with one food truck only. Before we had left the train we were informed that the train would be leaving by 7:55pm, giving us about 35 minutes, which you would think would be enough for the less than enthusiastic activities. We proceeded to wait online for about an hour, obviously there was no way we were going to make the train, the person running it came up to us when we were almost to the entrance of the haunted maze stating that the next train would be leaving at 8:35pm, it was currently 8:25pm. We asked what time the next train would be after that and we were told after 9. We were hoping that we would be in and out of the haunted maze before 8:35. The girl working the door to the maze came up to us and asked if we were trying to make the 8:35 and we said yes to which my friend stated that we weren’t expecting to have to wait so long, instead of apologizing she stated well I hope you have a terrible time at new hope. Now if she meant this as joking it was poorly done since we were already irritated about everything that had already transpired. Someone like that should not be involved with the public if you cannot take criticism especially when the event was planned so poorly. Just before we entered the maze the train that was supposed to be leaving at 8:35 left at 8:30. We get ushered in the maze which was not a maze just a straight line with some chicken wire. The entire thing took less than 2 minutes. I’m not sure why we stood on line for an hour. We then had to wait for the next train, we boarded at 8:45 and didn’t leave till almost 9. We had to figure out where the first class car was because no one was around to direct us and then we were left by ourselves. When we got back to the train station it was pointed out to me that all of the actors were on the train with us. The train times were completely off and misleading. If I could have given this experience less than 1 star I would, I wish we had read the reviews prior to spending over $300 and the responses from the owner stating that some people like it and some people don’t is complete BS. Everyone hated it, I can’t tell you how many people in our train ride back complained about how awful it was and what a waste of time and money it was. I hope this review will find people before they purchase tickets to this joke of a haunted train ride and if...

Extremely disappointed. I am a rail enthusiast and influencer that maintains a website of my exotic rail travels from all over the world. I've ridden the Flam railway in Norway, they WP&YR in Alaska, and numerous local excursions such as Strasburg, the Essex Steam Train in CT, and the Morristown & Eerie.

First, I will start with the positives. Rolling stock well maintained and clean. Most of the employees were nice. Now the bad part that, in effect, ruined the entire 90 minute trip.

My wife and I purchased the Fall foliage trip on October 19th, 1:00pm. We purchased VIP tickets costing $130 each for a total of $260. I make video recordings of all my trips for my websites and to influence my followers to visit. Upon boarding the train we opened the Window in our VIP car. 2 employees came by, very nicely, and said, "It's perfectly fine to record, just be careful not to stick any body parts out of the window due to close clearances". That's perfectly acceptable. My camera was inside the car, zoomed in, and positioned to record outside of the car perpendicular to the train (so nothing was sticking out). Then, we started moving and our ticket checker came in (did not get the name; heavy set fellow with a stubbly white beard). He immediately told me I could not stick anything out of the car, AND that all windows MUST remained closed during the ride (WHAT!?). I told him 2 other people have told me what I was doing was fine and that I'm not sticking anything out of the window. He said loudly "The window must remain closed because the air conditioner is on". It was not on, or if it was, it was barely working. The car was so stuffy and hot that we wanted the cross breeze. Plus, this is despite ALL other windows in the other cars being opened on the multiple trains that passed us in the siding, AND the fact that there were open air cars. So I was relegated to recording a trip through a closed window, which was dirty, and with sun glare coming in so that there was a reflection of the people in the car coming up in the shot. In addition, since the window was closed, we could not hear the railroad sounds like horns or the joints of the rail as we passed over them. The conductor was rude and un-accommodating. I am a member of the NYSW&THS up in Phillipsburg and we would never treat our riders in such a manner. So for me, the trip was a complete bust as I could not record it, enjoy it, or rewatch it for myself later. I could also not present footage of the ride for my followers to see; therefore I cannot recommend the trip to them. It's a shame because I'm sure the ride is beautiful; I just couldn't experience it.

VIP tickets are expensive. That being the ONLY car on the train where we were forbidden to open the windows is unacceptable and laughable. It does NOT allow us to fully immerse ourselves into the ride. Also a family decided to change a baby's diaper on the table in the middle of a VIP car across from us during the ride (instead of using the bathroom 20 feet away) and no one seemed to care. We paid premium for - what?

Sorry, but disappointed. It would be interesting to see if anyone reaches out...