Panther Creek Railroad
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Panther Creek Railroad
The Panther Creek Railroad had its origins in 1849. The Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company ( LC&N) constructed it between Lansford, PA and the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad operating as the Little Schuylkill Railroad in Tamaqua, PA. LC&N believed a direct route to take Panther Valley coal to eastern markets and a tunnel connecting Lansford to Hauto would open up possibilities with the Nesquehoning Valley Railroad. It also allowed the LC&N to cease coal shipments to the Lehigh Canal on the Summit Hill & Mauch Chunk Railroad, operating since 1827. Origins In 1849, LC&N constructed the six-mile long Panther Creek Railroad from Lansford to Tamaqua. This connected the rich Panther Valley coal mines in Coaldale and Lansford to the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad at Tamaqua and provided additional access to the Philadelphia market. In 1871, developers saw the possibilities of a tunnel connecting Lansford to Hauto which would open up connections with the Nesquehoning Valley Railroad ...
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Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company
The Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company was a mining and transportation company headquartered in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, now known as Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. The company operated from 1818 until its dissolution in 1964 and played an early and influential role in the rise of the American Industrial Revolution and early U.S. industrialization. The company ultimately encompassed source industries, transport, and manufacturing, making it the first vertically integrated U.S. company.Archer B. HulbertThe Paths of Inland Commerce, A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Vol. 21, The Chronicles of America Series. Editor: Allen Johnson (1921) Building on two predecessor companies incorporated in 1818,, 627 pages (pdf) founders Erskine Hazard and Josiah White entered the coal industry to serve customers seeking a steady supply of fuel for foundries and mills on the falls of the Schuylkill River. Its role in accelerating regional industrial development by taking on civil engineering ch ...
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Reading Company
The Reading Company ( ) was a Philadelphia-headquartered railroad that provided passenger and commercial rail transport in eastern Pennsylvania and neighboring states that operated from 1924 until its 1976 acquisition by Conrail. Commonly called the Reading Railroad, and logotyped as Reading Lines, the Reading Company was a railroad holding company for the majority of its existence and was a single railroad during its later years. It operated service as Reading Railway System and was a successor to the Philadelphia and Reading Railway Company, founded in 1833. Until the decline in anthracite loadings in the Coal Region after World War II, it was one of the most prosperous corporations in the United States. Competition with the modern trucking industry that used the interstate highway system for short-distance transportation of goods, also known as short hauls, compounded the company's problems, forcing it into bankruptcy in 1971. Its railroad operations were merged into Conrail i ...
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Little Schuylkill Navigation, Railroad And Coal Company
The Little Schuylkill Navigation, Railroad and Coal Company (LSRR) was a railway company in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania in the 19th century. The main line ran from Port Clinton to Tamaqua, for a total of . History The railroad received a charter from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania on February 28, 1826. Construction began in 1830. The tracks were constructed with strap iron on wood rails. Beginning with horse-drawn cars in 1831, the LSRR operated between Tamaqua, located at the end of the coal-rich Panther Creek Valley and the Port Clinton terminus of the Schuylkill Canal. It later made a rail junction with the Philadelphia and Reading Railway Company. In 1833, the railroad acquired two steam locomotives, built in Liverpool, but the wooden tracks did not support the engines, requiring a resumption of animal-powered operations. This over-extended investment nearly bankrupted the young company. Only in 1845 did iron "T" rails replace the wooden rails, allowing the costly ...
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Nesquehoning Valley Railroad
The Nesquehoning Valley Railroad Company,L.K. Strouse, 1929Interstate Commerce Commission Reports Decisions of the Interstate Commerce Commission of the United States, Volume 149 herein called the Nesquehoning Valley Railroad (NVRR), is now a fallen flag standard-gauge, steam era shortline railroad built as a coal road to ship the Anthracite mined in the Southeastern Coal Region on either side of the Little Schuylkill River tributary Panther Creek and the history making coal towns of the Panther Creek Valley down the Lehigh River transportation corridor to the Eastern seaboard. It was one of a variety of regional railroads which were subsidiaries of Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (LC&N), wherein the LC&N company financed part of the joint venture with outside interests; and often later bought a majority share or merged the railway into its railroad operating subsidiary, Lehigh & Susquehanna Railroad (LH&S}. Its of track were located within Carbon County and Schuylkill Cou ...
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Lehigh Canal
The Lehigh Canal, or the Lehigh Navigation Canal, is a navigable canal that begins at the mouth of Nesquehoning Creek on the Lehigh River in eastern Pennsylvania. It was built in two sections over a span of twenty years, beginning in 1818. The lower section spanned the distance between Easton and present-day Jim Thorpe. In Easton, the canal met the Delaware and Morris Canals, which allowed goods to be transported further up the U.S. East Coast. At its height, the Lehigh Canal was long. Although the canal was used to transport a variety of products, its most significant cargo was anthracite coal and pig iron, which proved cornerstones of the Lehigh Valley's ascent as a central hub for the American Industrial Revolution. Their mining and transport defined the character of the towns surrounding the canal. The route consisted initially of canals and dammed-off sections of the Lehigh River. Boatmen had to navigate barges periodically from the canal through a lock onto the river or v ...
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Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway
The Mauch Chunk and Summit Railroad was a coal-hauling railroad in the mountains of Pennsylvania that operated between 1828 and 1932. It was the first operational railway, in the United States, of any substantial length to carry paying passengers. A private line which moved coal for the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company on gauge track, it was not a common carrier which linked with other railroads. The rail line was laid on top of the company's earlier -constant-descent-graded wagon road. The railroad operated for over a hundred years until the middle of the Great Depression. History The Mauch Chunk was the second permanent United States railroad and the first over five miles long. Early days: 1828-1845 Like its rival the B&O Railroad, the Mauch Chunk at first used animal power. Mules hauled the empty coal tubs to the summit and were sent down in the last batch of cars; the return trip required 4–5 hours. The road would send down groups of 6–8 coal cars under contro ...
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Central Railroad Of New Jersey
The Central Railroad of New Jersey, also known as the Jersey Central or Jersey Central Lines , was a Class I railroad with origins in the 1830s. It was absorbed into Conrail in April 1976 along with several other prominent bankrupt railroads of the Northeastern United States. History The earliest railroad ancestor of the CNJ was the Elizabethtown & Somerville Railroad, incorporated in 1831 and opened from Elizabethport to Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1836. Horses gave way to steam in 1839, and the railroad was extended west, reaching Somerville at the beginning of 1842. The Somerville & Easton Railroad was incorporated in 1847 and began building westward. In 1849 it purchased the Elizabethtown & Somerville and adopted a new name: Central Railroad Company of New Jersey. The line reached Phillipsburg, on the east bank of the Delaware River, in 1852. It was extended east across Newark Bay to Jersey City in 1864, and it gradually acquired branches to Flemington, Newark, Perth Am ...
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Lehigh And Susquehanna Railroad
The Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad is a defunct railroad that operated in eastern Pennsylvania during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The company was a subsidiary of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (LC&N), but for much of its lifetime leased by the Central Railroad of New Jersey. It was founded in 1837 to carry coal from the North Branch Division of the Pennsylvania Canal to the Lehigh Canal, but would later be extended to the Delaware River at Easton, Pennsylvania. It was sold to Conrail in 1976. History The LC&N chartered the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad on March 31, 1837, in order to link the North Branch Division of the Pennsylvania Canal at Wilkes-Barre and the Lehigh Canal at White Haven. Construction of the railroad began in 1839 and was completed in 1841. The arduous route required the construction of a tunnel and three inclined planes, including the famed Ashley Planes. In 1862, flooding damaged the Lehigh Canal north of Mauch Chunk (now Jim Thorpe). ...
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Hauto Tunnel
The Hauto Tunnel, dug in 1871–72, was a single-track railway tunnel crossing under the barrier ridge of Nesquehoning Mountain between Lansford, Pennsylvania, in the Panther Creek Valley and the Central Railroad of New Jersey trackage near the dam of the Hauto Reservoir impoundment about above Nesquehoning, Pennsylvania. The tunnel was significant for cutting nearly off the trip to the Lehigh Canal terminal or, by rail, to other eastern coal companies, in the era when anthracite was the king of energy fuels. Built as a joint venture by the Central Railroad of New Jersey and landlords Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (LC&N Co.) shortly after the LC&N board of directors had decided to opt out of the rail transportation business and leased all the railroads it owned or controlled under subsidiary Lehigh & Susquehanna Railroad to the CNJ. The tunnel began as a notion when LC&N Co. miners needed to drain water from a higher mine gallery under the Panther Creek Valley and so dug a d ...
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Panther Creek Valley
In Eastern Pennsylvania, the valley of the Panther Creek tributary of the Little Schuylkill River, a very small and relatively short mountain creek, was historically important due to its stranglehold on energy production, a key region central to the industrial development of the United States from the 1820s through the 1870s, and remained important as an energy producing region until decline of the Eastern U.S. Steel Industries in the 1960s. Panther Creek Valley lies between and over the Anthracite ladened folds of the two long near parallel ridgelines, Nesquehoning and Pisgah Ridges forming the side walls and supplying the wealth which shipped from the Panther Creek Valley making the region historically important, as for several decades its land owners, ''Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (LC&N)'' held a virtual monopoly on Anthracite produced and shipped not only to eastern U.S. Cities via the Lehigh Canal, but to transoceanic markets. For perspective, LC&N must be viewed as a ...
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Lehigh And New England Railroad
The Lehigh & New England Railroad was a Class I railroad located in Northeastern United States that acted as a bridge line. It was the second notable U.S. railroad to file for abandonment in its entirety, the first being the New York, Ontario & Western Railway. History South Mountain and Boston and successors: 1873-1882 Around 1868, serious proposals for the crossing of the Hudson River at Poughkeepsie began to appear. A charter for the Poughkeepsie Bridge Company was obtained in 1871, and the company was organized before the end of May. The charter was amended to allow placing piers in the river by 1872 (despite fierce opposition from navigation interests), and the company began raising funds. Through the influence of Andrew Carnegie, Pennsylvania Railroad president J. Edgar Thomson was persuaded to personally invest in the project. This funding led to a surge of activity. The line was to be carried from Harrisburg to the crossing of the Delaware River at Portland by the S ...
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Reading, Blue Mountain And Northern Railroad
The Reading Blue Mountain and Northern Railroad , sometimes shortened to Reading and Northern Railroad, is a regional railroad in eastern Pennsylvania. Its headquarters is in Port Clinton. The RBMN provides freight service on of track. Its mainline consists of the Reading Division between Reading and Packerton and the Lehigh Division between Lehighton and Dupont. Its main freight cargo is anthracite coal. Passenger excursions also run on RBMN tracks. The RBMN itself operates excursion service from Reading and Port Clinton to Jim Thorpe, while the Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway (LGSR) offers service between Jim Thorpe and Lehigh Gorge State Park. Main lines RBMN operates two main lines: * Reading Division: Reading, Pennsylvania– Packerton, Pennsylvania, along the Lehigh River. ** The line runs from Reading to Packerton along former Reading Company and Central Railroad of New Jersey lines. At its south end, it connects to the Norfolk Southern Railway's Reading Line; its east ...
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