The Nesquehoning Valley Railroad Company, [1] 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 38.521 mi (61.994 km) of track were located within Carbon County and Schuylkill Counties in the State of Pennsylvania, less than half of which was within the valley formed by the Nesquehoning Creek, which ascent was straight forward. The majority of the track is thus in the Schuylkill Basin using more curvaceous climbing.
The road had virtually no rolling stock, instead being an example of a shortline built in a corridor that was a necessary choice and then leveraging the niche established against the needs of operating rail companies. The owned mileage extends in a westerly direction from Nesquehoning Junction to Tamenend, 16.719 miles, with a line 0.955 mile in length leaving the above-described road in the village of Hauto, and extending southerly through the Hauto Tunnel into coal mine trackage in Lansford, Pennsylvania. The Nesquehoning Valley Railroad embraces 38.521 miles (61.994 km). The entire railroad was leased shortly after its construction to the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company, which in turn subleased 16.719 miles to The Central Railroad Company of New Jersey (CNJ, or Jersey Central) and 0.955 mile to the Lehigh and New England Railroad Company.
The Nesquehoning Valley Railroad was incorporated by special act of Pennsylvania approved May 14, 1861, for the purpose of constructing a railroad from a point near the mouth of the Nesquehoning Creek (known now as Nesquehoning Junction and the former Lausanne Landing, in the borough of Jim Thorpe) where it joined the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad between Easton-Mountain Top from whence it began to climb, struggling steadily upwards in a long climb beside Nesquehoning Creek with Nesquehoning Ridge to the south, and Broad Mountain to the north up past the streams' headwaters below the drainage divide at Hometown in the saddle of the pass. From there the road dropped down westerly into the valley of Little Schuylkill River where it took a convoluted path entering Tamaqua where it connected to the Panther Creek Railroad and the Philadelphia and Reading Railway (Reading Railroad) at Tamaqua Junction.
The Nesquehoning Valley Railroad also enjoys the powers and is subject to the restrictions of a general law approved February 19, 1849. In 1861 the Nesquehoning Valley Railroad began the construction of its road. The work was temporarily suspended in the latter part of the year 1862, but was resumed in 1868. The main line was completed in April, 1870, and the Hauto Tunnel between the village and railyard at Hauto along the Nesquehoning Creek to the coal breakers and coal yards in Lansford, Pennsylvania, and the rest of the Panther Creek Valley was completed in 1872, as a joint-effort of the CNJ, the new leasee of the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad subsidiary of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company.
The Nesquehoning Valley Railroad would in time connect the Lehigh Canal and CNJ's customers to the coal deposits around Mahanoy City, and those deposits in the Panther Creek to customers beyond in the lower Susquehanna Valley. With the strength of this connective flexibility, the roadbed of the NVRR is still in use today as an important standard E-W rail corridor, today operated by the Reading, Blue Mountain and Northern Railroad.
Beaver Meadows is a borough in Carbon County, Pennsylvania, United States. It is part of Northeastern Pennsylvania. The population was 897 at the 2020 U.S. census.
Lansford is a county-border borough (town) in Carbon County, Pennsylvania, United States. It is part of Northeastern Pennsylvania. It is located 37 miles (60 km) northwest of Allentown and 19 miles south of Hazleton in the Panther Creek Valley about 72 miles (116 km) from Philadelphia and abutting the cross-county sister-city of Coaldale in Schuylkill County.
Coaldale is a borough in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, United States. Initially settled in 1827, it was incorporated in 1906 from part of the former Rahn Township; it is named for the coal industry—wherein, it was one of the principal early mining centers. Coaldale is in the southern Anthracite Coal region in the Panther Creek Valley, a tributary of the Little Schuylkill River, along which U.S. Route 209 was eventually built between the steep climb up Pisgah Mountain from Nesquehoning (easterly) and its outlet in Tamaqua, approximately five miles to the west.
Tamaqua is a borough in eastern Schuylkill County in the Coal Region of Pennsylvania, United States. It had a population of 6,934 as of the 2020 U.S. census.
The Lehigh and 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 after the New York, Ontario and Western Railway. It was headquartered in Philadelphia.
The Lehigh Canal is a navigable canal that begins at the mouth of Nesquehoning Creek on the Lehigh River in the Lehigh Valley and Northeastern regions of Pennsylvania. It was built in two sections over a span of 20 years beginning in 1818. The lower section spanned the distance between Easton and present-day Jim Thorpe. In Easton, the canal met the Pennylvania Canal's Delaware Division and Morris Canals, which allowed anthracite coal and other goods to be transported further up the U.S. East Coast. At its height, the Lehigh Canal was 72 miles (116 km) long.
Lehigh Gorge State Park is a 4,548 acres (1,841 ha) Pennsylvania state park in Luzerne and Carbon Counties, Pennsylvania. The park encompasses a gorge, which stretches along the Lehigh River from a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers flood control dam in Luzerne County to Jim Thorpe in Carbon County.
Nesquehoning Creek is an east flowing 14.9-mile-long (24.0 km) tributary of the Lehigh River in northeastern Pennsylvania in the United States.
Barnesville is an unincorporated community in Ryan Township, Pennsylvania, United States. Originally built to support nearby rust belt industries, the hamlet is between the center and eastern thirds of the Southern Anthracite Coal Region. The community is part of a wide-ranging township and is situated atop a summit and drainage divide flanked by two long climbs that are traversed by local transport infrastructure, railways with an important switching junction within the village, and Pennsylvania Route 54, which collects towns like beads on a string along a particular combination of connected valleys in the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians.
The Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company (LCAN) (1988–2010) was a modern-day anthracite coal mining company headquartered in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. It acquired many properties and relaunched the Lehigh Coal Companies brand in 1988. The LCAN ran strip mining operations in the Panther Creek Valley east of Lansford, Pennsylvania along U.S. Route 209 with vast properties dominating the coal areas of Tamaqua, Coaldale, and Lansford.
Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company was a mining and transportation company headquartered in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, in present-day Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, in Northeastern Pennsylvania. The company operated from 1818 until its dissolution in 1964 and played an early and influential role in the American Industrial Revolution.
Panther Creek is a west-draining left-bank tributary of the Little Schuylkill River's drainage basin and rises in the vicinity of the east side of Lansford in the plateau-like nearly flat terrain of the complex three-way saddle between Mount Pisgah to its east, Nesquehoning Ridge to the north and Pisgah Ridge to the south, both ridgelines flanking its entire course as it makes its way east-northeast to west-southwest.
Pisgah Mountain, or Pisgah Ridge on older USGS maps, is a ridgeline running 12.5 miles (20.1 km) from Tamaqua to Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania from the Little Schuylkill River water gap to the Lehigh River water gap.
Nesquehoning Mountain or Nesquehoning Ridge is a 15–17-mile-long (24–27 km) coal bearing ridge dividing the waters of Lehigh Valley to the north from the Schuylkill River valley and the several near parallel ridgelines of the Ridge-and-valley Appalachians barrier range all local members of which run generally WSW-ENE in the greater overall area.
Mauch Chunk Ridge or Mauch Chunk Mountain is a historically important barrier ridgeline north of the Blue Mountain escarpment and 3rd parallel ridgeline south of the Nesquehoning Creek after Nesquehoning Mountain and Pisgah Ridge in the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians of Northeastern Pennsylvania.
Erskine Hazard (1790-1865) and his partner Josiah White were industrialists who developed infrastructure projects in Pennsylvania and throughout the Northeastern United States, which proved influential in ushering in the industrial revolution in the United States, which served as a foundation for the rise of the United States as the world's foremost economic power.
Broad Mountain or Broad Ridge in the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians in Carbon County and Schuylkill County in Pennsylvania is a steep-faced, anthracite-bearing barrier ridge just south of both Beaver Meadows and Weatherly, north of Nesquehoning and west and south of the Lehigh River basin west of the southwest border of the Poconos. The mountain ridge line is mostly flat and looks very similar to the man-made piles of culm in the region from the roads and towns looking up.
The Hauto Tunnel, dug in 1871–72, was a 1.1-mile-long (1.8 km) 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 1.3 miles (2.1 km) above Nesquehoning, Pennsylvania. The tunnel was significant for cutting nearly 15 difficult mountainous miles (24 km) 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.
The Room Run Railroad was an early American gravity railroad with self-acting planes. It was built by the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company to transport coal from the Room Run Mine in Nesquehoning, Pennsylvania to landings at Mauch Chunk on the Lehigh River so it could be shipped on the Lehigh Canal to the Delaware River at Easton, Pennsylvania to markets in Philadelphia or New York City via the Delaware or Morris Canals.
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.