A second gravity railroad was completed in 1850 to transport coal mined by the Pennsylvania Coal Company more than forty miles from Port Griffith on the Susquehanna to the town originally known as Paupack Eddy on the Delaware & Hudson Canal. In 1851, this town’s name was changed to Hawley, after Irad Hawley, the first president of the Pennsylvania Coal Company.
In 1847, when the canal system was enlarged, the Delaware & Hudson Canal Company hired John Roebling, a young German immigrant engineer, and acquired some other innovative engineering features in the suspension aqueducts he designed. Roebling had already designed bridges in western Pennsylvania using the principle of wire rope suspension, and he would later take his place in history for designing the Brooklyn Bridge, a grand suspension structure. Once Roebling’s aqueducts spanning the Lackawaxen and Delaware were open for business, observers were treated to the spectacle of canal boats floating above rivers on their own water-filled bridges. The D&H had two additional Roebling aqueducts located in New York State.
After 1850, the Delaware & Hudson Canal Company expanded its railroad operations to new mines in the Scranton–Wilkes-Barre area and finally began using genuine locomotive power. By 1870, a branch line joined the D&H in Carbondale with the main line of the Erie at Lanesboro, effectively giving the D&H access to the railroads of New York State as well as New England. In the ensuing years, the D&H constructed and leased railroad lines in New York State and eventually became known as a “bridge line” to Canada. In 1898, in order to save cash, the then obsolete canal was abandoned and so was the famous Gravity, which had since been converted to passenger and excursion service to scenic mountain picnic areas. In 1928, the company’s name was changed to the Delaware & Hudson Railroad Corporation.
Today the history of the D&H is preserved by the Bridge Line Historical Society in Albany and the Wayne County Historical Society in Honesdale.
Canadian Pacific and Norfolk Southern in the Region
Both Norfolk Southern and Canadian Pacific currently own trackage in this region, and these companies and their leasing operators are seeing business grow, mainly because of the demands of the shale gas industry. The story of how these Class I railroads got into the Poconos is thoroughly entwined with the sad tale of railroad bankruptcies following that of the Penn Central.
By the early 1970s, the D&H had been acquired by Dereco Corporation, a subsidiary of Norfolk & Western Railway, which had also acquired the Erie Lackawanna. The Erie Lackawanna became part of Conrail when the latter was created in 1976, but the D&H was left out, perhaps to maintain at least the appearance of competition in the Northeast. To this end, Congress had also granted the D&H trackage rights over Conrail to reach Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. In the 1980s, Conrail conveyed to the D&H a former DL&W line from Binghamton to Taylor Yard near Wilkes-Barre, as well as what was then known as the Sunbury Line, which had been built by smaller railroads but long had been a part of the Pennsy system connecting the Pennsy to various anthracite railroads around Wilkes-Barre.
In 1984, a company called Guilford Transportation Industries purchased the D&H together with two other New England railroads, with the objective of creating a regional system that would stretch from Montreal to the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest. When this plan did not work out, Guilford declared the D&H bankrupt and abandoned the railroad to the state of New York, after which the federal government appointed the New York, Susquehanna and Western Railway (NYSW) to operate the D&H. Lackawanna County purchased the line between Carbondale and Scranton so that local industries could be served by an operator called the Delaware-Lackawanna Railroad. Traffic dwindled on the Sunbury Line, while NYSW routed most southbound traffic via Allentown. In 1991, Canadian Pacific Railway purchased the D&H in order to give its trans-Canada system a connection between Montreal and New York City.
Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) had been formed as part of the effort to unite Canadian provinces into a confederation. It was incorporated in 1881 to link Canada’s eastern cities with a relatively unpopulated west. Its main line was completed by 1885, and the corporation expanded its operations into a variety of other businesses, making it Canada’s second-largest corporation a century later. Canadian Pacific’s purchase of the D&H followed its taking control of the Soo Line in the American Midwest, which had given the railroad access to Chicago. The railroad created an entity called the St. Lawrence and Hudson Railway to operate in eastern North America in 1996 but dissolved it in 2001.
Today Canadian Pacific’s operations in Pennsylvania are conducted by its Sunbury subdivision along a 137-mile main line between Binghamton and Sunbury. Trains are operated by both Canadian Pacific and Norfolk Southern, whose Buffalo Line Canadian Pacific connects with in Sunbury, giving CPR access to Harrisburg and points farther south. Around Wilkes-Barre, the Sunbury Line is owned by Luzerne County and operated by the short line called the Luzerne and Susquehanna Railway Company, which was formed in 1994 from the remains of various defunct railroads in the Wyoming Valley. Canadian Pacific also operates over RBMN tracks south to Carbon City and the Lehigh Valley and Philadelphia areas. At its Taylor Yard, CPR is developing facilities to handle freight shipments for the shale gas industry.
The breakup of Conrail brought Norfolk Southern into the region with its acquisition of what is now called the Southern Tier Line, which had been part of the Erie Lackawanna pre-Conrail. In 2004, Norfolk Southern leased a portion of this line to a short line called the Central New York Railroad, enabling it to offer local freight service. In 2009, operations by a short line called the Lehigh Railway began on Norfolk Southern lines that had originally been part of the Lehigh Valley Railroad between Sayre and Mehoopany. Coincidentally, the same year, the Reading & Northern purchased the line between Towanda and Monroeton, which also once had been part of the Lehigh system and with which the Lehigh Railway now interchanges. Both will serve the shale gas industry. Business for the Lehigh Railway was so good that in 2010, the Central Bradford [County] Progress Authority named it 2009 Business of the Year.
The PNRRA
During the 1980s, business concerns in the Scranton area recognized the need to save freight rail service along what had been the D&H between Scranton and Carbondale and the DL&W southeast from Scranton to the Delaware Water Gap. The Monroe County Rail Authority was formed in 1980 and the Lackawanna Railroad Authority in 1985 to acquire what Conrail was anxious to abandon and halt its removal of tracks. In 2006, the two county authorities merged into the Pennsylvania Northeast Regional Railroad Authority (PNRRA) in order to pool resources toward becoming a major economic development force in northeast Pennsylvania.
Today PNRRA is headquartered in the Bridge 60 Tower at Steamtown in Scranton. The Alco locomotives used by its rail operator, the Delaware-Lackawanna Railroad Company, can sometimes be observed parked adjacent to the vintage cars and locomotives standing on tracks just off the Steamtown parking lot. The authority provides freight service to about twenty-five industries and connects with both Norfolk Southern and Canadian Pacific, a factor that has been instrumental to its success according to PNRRA’s president, Lawrence C. Malski. Its largest customer is a $40 million-plus flour mill in Mount Pocono, which chose its location specifically so that it would not be captive to any single Class I railroad.
Locomotives of the Delaware-Lackawanna Railroad.
The emerging shale gas industry has resulted in the demand for transportation of new commodities to the area, including materials for the construction of drilling platforms and pipelines. In 2010, PNRRA announced that it was working with a private firm on improvements to the old rail yard in Carbondale, where no one had worked since the 1960s. Malski observed that Carbondale, founded by one energy industry, might well see its boomtown status restored thanks to this new energy industry. As of the summer of 2011, there were preliminary plans to restore trackage and rail service north of Carbondale, which the authority had been earlier unable to save.
Another major goal of PNRRA is to reestablish passenger service
over the old Lackawanna Cutoff from Scranton to Hoboken, New Jersey, or to Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan via transfer. Tracks were removed from the Jersey side of the Cutoff back in the 1980s, but by 2011, all the necessary preliminary studies to reinstate the tracks had been completed, and brush was being cleared from the old roadbed around Lake Lackawanna, which is not that far from the PNRRA tracks at Delaware Water Gap. PNRRA had already taken care to preserve the old passenger stations in Pennsylvania by working in conjunction with local authorities and historical societies. The concept of excursions sharing the tracks with scheduled passenger trains was a definite possibility.
Rail Stories of the Region
Old Mauch Chunk
The history of Pennsylvania’s most famous boomtown began in the drizzling rain on an evening in 1791, when a hunter named Philip Ginter literally stumbled on a lump of anthracite coal on Summit Hill. The next day, he carried it to the community then known as Fort Allen (now Weissport), where he presented it to Jacob Weiss, who ran a lumber business and purportedly had been seeking just such a natural resource. Weiss organized the Lehigh Coal-Mine Company, but the product he shipped to Philadelphia around 1806 was not a big hit in the fuel market. Business improved during the War of 1812, when Virginia’s bituminous coal became prohibitively expensive, but dropped off again when the war was over.
A lucky accident finally revealed the hidden virtues of anthracite, sometimes known as stone coal. Around 1814, Josiah White and Erskine Hazard, who manufactured wire in a factory near the Falls of the Schuylkill River, purchased two boatloads of anthracite coal. After spending an entire night trying to get it to burn in the furnace, their workmen finally shut the furnace door and left the mill in frustration. One returned because he had forgotten his jacket and noticed that the door of the furnace was red hot and its interior was glowing with white heat. Eureka! The trick to burning stone coal was to ignite it, shut the furnace, and leave it alone for a while.
Mauch Chunk and its coal-hauling railroad system, as depicted in Eli Bowen’s 1852 Pictorial Sketch-book of Pennsylvania.
White and Hazard sold their Philadelphia business, and in 1818, they founded two other businesses, the Lehigh Navigation Company and the Lehigh Coal Company, which were incorporated as the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company in 1822. Once the Lehigh River was sufficiently improved for reliable descending navigation, they began shipping increasingly large amounts of what Philadelphians learned to appreciate as some of the best coal America had to offer.
A more developed Mauch Chunk from the 1875 Philadelphia and Its Environs. Note the parallel railroad and canal.
Between the mine at Summit Hill and the Lehigh River port called Mauch Chunk was a distance of about nine miles over which coal had to be painstakingly transported in wagons. The entrepreneurs replaced this bottleneck with a gravity railroad system, begun in 1827, that was far less complex but became more famous than the one associated with the D&H.
When the railroad first began operating, mules hauled the empty cars from Mauch Chunk to Summit Hill. After the cars were loaded and ready to descend by gravity alone, the mules were led into the lead car, where they were fed, making it possible in later years for what was then called the Summit Hill–Mauch Chunk Railroad to amusingly claim that it had offered America’s first dining car service.
By 1845, a second track, called the “back track,” was added to Mauch Chunk’s gravity railroad, making the system a more efficient continuous loop between loading points near Summit Hill and the Lehigh River. The mules were replaced by stationary steam engines at the summits of Mount Pisgah and Mount Jefferson, which drew railroad cars to their peaks, where they were allowed simply to coast to the base of the next inclined plane.
Between 1845 and 1870, two additional inclined planes were built to haul coal from new mining operations in the Panther Valley to Summit Hill. Because the route that the railroad cars had to descend was too steep for a straight line of railroad tracks, the tracks were constructed in a way that allowed the cars to zigzag back and forth in order to gradually lose momentum. This local transportation system became known as the Mauch Chunk, Summit Hill & Switchback Railroad. Even after a new Nesquehoning Valley Railroad built in 1871 made this unusual switchback feature obsolete, the name stuck. The entire line was popularly called Mauch Chunk’s “Switchback Railroad” until it was torn up in the 1930s.
As business grew for the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company, so did Mauch Chunk. In July 1829, Hazard’s Register of Pennsylvania reported, “The town is very flourishing, being at the head of the Lehigh Canal, and the termination of the Mauch Chunk Rail Road. It contains now about 1500 souls, and is fast increasing in population.” The thriving community remained a company town until 1831, when the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company began selling town lots, opening Mauch Chunk to individual enterprise, which resulted in even more growth.
To this day, Mauch Chunk’s most famous citizen remains Asa Packer, who began his career as a canal boat operator, progressing to shop owner and canal boat builder. Additional enterprises involving the mining and shipping of coal made him a rich man by the 1850s. His Lehigh Valley Railroad made him a legend and broke the transportation monopoly enjoyed by the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company in the Lehigh Valley.
The fabled Mount Pisgah Plane of Mauch Chunk, as pictured in Philadelphia and Its Environs.
In 1862, a devastating flood raised the Lehigh River thirty feet, damaging commercial buildings, houses, the canal, and the railroad. Because railroads were easier to rebuild than canals, the managers of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company decided to replace part of their system with the extension of a short railroad that they already operated, the Lehigh & Susquehanna Railroad. By 1868, the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company was running trains on this line between Wilkes-Barre and Easton, and shortly after that, it became the Lehigh & Susquehanna division of the Central Railroad of New Jersey, giving the CNJ permanent access to some of Pennsylvania’s best coalfields.
By 1898, the CNJ had also acquired Mauch Chunk’s old “Switchback” system, which was no longer hauling coal and had since evolved into a tourist attraction for the river town that had become a vacation resort called the “Switzerland of America.” The slow ride up a steep incline followed by a free-fall descent served as a model for America’s amusement park roller coasters.
Besides enjoying an exciting ride, visitors to Mauch Chunk could explore the great outdoors in an area that always had been physically beautiful. Alfred Mathews describes it in his 1884 History of the Counties of Lehigh and Carbon in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania: “To the eye of the traveler who approaches this unique town from the south, this mountain is the first striking object in the rugged and wild landscape which forms its environment. Following the great sweep of the rushing Lehigh River, it rises as a mighty verdure-clad wall from its very brink, and makes more dark the deep and tortuous gorge through which the river seeks the south, and finally flowing through the Lehigh Gap, emerges from its mountain-pent channel into the broader and sunnier valley, bordered by smaller and more gently sloping hills.” A waterfall at a place originally called Moore’s Ravine, but later given the more romantic-sounding name of Glen Onoko, was a favorite destination for visitors to Mauch Chunk, and the Lehigh Valley Railroad did its part to make the remote glen accessible by constructing bridges and pathways.
Mauch Chunk went downhill with the coal industry, but local boosters tried to maintain their tourism business by providing a monument and resting place for the Native American Olympic hero Jim Thorpe, who actually had no connection with the area. In 1954, Mauch Chunk merged with East Mauch Chunk, and the two communities became Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania.
It took a different kind of attraction, however, to bring the visitors back some thirty years later. Around the 1980s, America’s interest in the styles and social history of the late nineteenth century was growing, and so was the number of guests at Asa Packer’s mansion, built in 1860 and opened to tourists in 1964. It was a
rare thing for a historic house to be preserved with virtually all its furnishings intact, but the Packer mansion contained the family’s dishes and silverware, furniture and chandeliers—in short, everything to illustrate the life of a wealthy American family in the Victorian era. Jim Thorpe has been playing up its Victorian heritage ever since, and the town is now a fascinating gateway to the Poconos.
Tourism in the Poconos
Besides valuable deposits of coal, the area today called the Pocono Mountains had been blessed with winding brooks, picturesque waterfalls, and colorful mountain laurel. At a dramatic two-mile gorge called the Delaware Water Gap, where the Delaware River flows through a natural opening in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a Frenchman named Antoine Dutot bought some land. In 1829, he began construction of the Kittatinny House, a hotel purchased and completed by Samuel Snyder in 1832. Accommodations even more quaint and rustic could be found at the homes and boardinghouses operated by local farmers. A perfect vacation resort was in the making for the residents of New York and Philadelphia, but until they could reach the area by rail, a stay in the Poconos involved a two-day trip by stagecoach.
In the 1850s, the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad expanded its lines from Scranton to what would become East Stroudsburg. Shortly after the turn of the century, the Pennsy and the DL&W joined forces to provide daily service from Philadelphia to Monroe County. Passengers rode the Pennsylvania Railroad to a junction called Manunka Chunk, above the present town of Belvidere, where they changed to DL&W trains. Suddenly the Poconos were less than a day away, and Delaware Water Gap was poised to become America’s second-largest inland resort town, after Saratoga Springs, New York.
Railroads of Pennsylvania Page 22