The Newtown Square Freight station was constructed in 1895, shortly after the Pennsylvania Railroad branch line was built. It was located on the west side of Newtown Street Road (Rt. 252) and what is now Winding Way (near where the new WAWA now stands). This was also the site of the lumber and coal yard, plus a feed and grain store. A corral was located in back of the freight station to hold livestock for shipments to and from the farms in the area. Farmers would bring their horses to E.W. Powell, the veterinarian, and after being tended by him they would be shipped out by stock car. A passenger station was next to the freight station. It housed the post office and telegraph station for many years. The freight station was the end of the branch line, the last stop from Philadelphia.

Just before it arrived at the station, the train would have passed through the 600-acre Pennsylvania Hospital Farm, which housed many resident worker-families as well as patients, with hundreds of farm animals and acres of orchards and gardens. It was a massive operation, encompassing (more or less) all the area between Goshen Road and West Chester Pike and between Newtown Street Road and Bryn Mawr Avenue.

Between 1895 and 1908, as many as thirteen trains a day pulled in and out of the Newtown Square station: the milk train, the mail train, and various freight and passenger trains.  The railroad ran its passenger service from 1895 to 1908, but its freight service operated into 1963 - in the later years servicing mostly the lumberyard.  There were ten stops on the line - eight of them were “flag stops”, along with the Llanerch and Newtown Square stations.  The freight station is the last vestige of the Newtown Square branch of the P.R.R. freight and passenger line that once rumbled 9.2 miles between Newtown Township and Philadelphia.

Several years ago, when the Winding Way bypass was to be built, the abandoned freight station was saved from destruction by the Newtown Square Historical Society, who raised money to have it disassembled and relocated to Newtown Township’s Drexel Lodge Park, where it was restored and the Newtown Square Railroad Museum built up around it – which now includes a 1902 passenger car, 1907 box car, 1950 caboose and small steam engine.