The Room (or Rhume) Run Railroad was an early American gravity railroad with self-acting planes. [1] 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 [2] 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.
In 1806, coal was being mined at the Room Run Mine and in one instance was shipped to Philadelphia from Lausanne, Pennsylvania, located at the confluence of the Nesquehoning Creek and the Lehigh River about one-mile upstream from Mauch Chunk. [3] The Room Run mine was located about 4 miles from Lausanne making the transport of the coal extracted there much easier from this location to the landing. No other alternative was available at that time to transport the coal except to move it to Summit Hill, Pennsylvania by wagon, and from there to another wagon trail to Mauch Chunk, which would triple the transport time with no less difficulty in travel.
In 1814, Room Run coal was shipped to a mill owned by Josiah White and Erskine Hazard at the falls of the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. [4] White and Hazard became investors in Lehigh Coal Mining Company, eventually becoming part of its successor companies’ management.
When White was acting manager of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company in 1830, he convinced his board to develop the Room Run Mine to increase production substantially adding to Lehigh’s other mine in the area at Summit Hill. White also determined that coal closer to the Lehigh River at Room Run Mine could be more economical since it had its own railroad to deliver coal to Lausanne, rather than transporting it to Summit Hill and then shipping it over the new existing gravity railway in use there. [5] The work was authorized in late 1830. [6]
Construction of the project began in 1831. [7] Work was suspended later that year to wait for some work on the Delaware and Morris Canals to be completed. [8] Work resumed in May 1832 and the railroad was completed in 1833. [9] In 1833, over 21,000 tons of anthracite coal was transported over the just completed railroad. [10]
The railroad had three self-acting planes in which loaded wagons going down pull, via a cable and drum, the empty wagons going up. Two of these planes were located at the railroad’s entrance from Room Run, a small creek, into the narrow Nesquehoning Valley. The third was located at the descent to the Lehigh River elevation before the short track to the landing. [11] The coal was delivered into wharves located at the Mauch Chunk Pond within the town and not to Lausanne. The balance of the railroad was animal (mule) operated. The majority of the railroad , was single tracked, except for the inclined planes which were double tracked. [12] The route followed much the same route of the present U.S. Route 209 between Nesquehoning and Jim Thorpe. [13] Unlike the Summit Hill, Mauch Chunk Switchback Railroad had a stationary steam engine. The Room Run Railroad relied solely on mule power to retrieve the empty cars from Mauch Chunk. Special cars allowed the mules to ride downhill before beginning the trip back to Nesquehoning and the climb up the plane to the mines. [14] To the east, and close to the Lehigh River, the descent is very steep. [15]
The wooden rails for the gravity route were made of oak, and attached to iron knees by spikes. Strap-iron rail was laid along the inside edge of the oak rails. The iron rails were beveled at the ends for better continuity between sections. [16]
During operation of the planes, the looped ropes especially on the steep plane, made from either hemp or iron chain, were subject to significant wear. In 1838, the Lehigh Company replaced this rope with an iron band one-twelfth of an inch thick but three inches wide. This improvement proved successful and the change was made to the other two inclined planes, which saved replacement and downtime costs. [17]
The Room Run Gravity Railroad was replaced by the Nesquehoning Valley Railroad. A new main line was completed in April 1870 along with the Hauto Tunnel through Nesquehoning Mountain to coal yards in Lansford, Pennsylvania, and the rest of the Panther Creek Valley was completed in 1872 as a joint-effort of the CNJ and Lehigh. CNJ operated the new railroad as a lease of the Lehigh Company.
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.
Jim Thorpe is a borough and the county seat of Carbon County in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. It is part of Northeastern Pennsylvania. It is historically known as the burial site of Native American sports legend Jim Thorpe.
The Coal Region is a region of Northeastern Pennsylvania. It is known for being home to the largest known deposits of anthracite coal in the world with an estimated reserve of seven billion short tons.
A predecessor to the Class I Delaware and Hudson Railway, the 1820s-built Delaware and Hudson Canal Company Gravity Railroad('D&H Gravity Railroad') was a historic gravity railroad incorporated and chartered in 1826 with land grant rights in the US state of Pennsylvania as a humble subsidiary of the Delaware and Hudson Canal and it proved to contain the first trackage of the later organized Delaware and Hudson Railroad. It began as the second long U.S. gravity railroad built initially to haul coal to canal boats, was the second railway chartered in the United States after the Mohawk and Hudson Rail Road before even, the Baltimore and Ohio. As a long gravity railway, only the Summit Hill and Mauch Chunk Railroad pre-dated its beginning of operations.
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 Delaware 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. The primary recreational activity at Lehigh Gorge State Park is white water rafting.
The Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway, also known as the Mauch Chunk and Summit Railroad and occasionally shortened to Mauch Chunk Railway, was a coal-hauling railroad in the mountains of Pennsylvania that was built in 1827 and operated until 1932. It was the second gravity railway constructed in the United States, which was used by the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company to transport coal from Summit Hill downhill to the Lehigh canal.
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.
The Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company was a mining and transportation company headquartered in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, now known as Jim Thorpe in Northeastern 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.
Josiah White (1781–1850) was a Pennsylvania industrialist and key figure in the American Industrial Revolution.
Ashley Planes was a historic freight cable railroad situated along three separately powered inclined plane sections located between Ashley, Pennsylvania at the foot, and via the Solomon cutting the yard in Mountain Top over 1,000 feet (300 m) above and initially built between 1837-38 by Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company's subsidiary Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad (L&S). One result of the 1837 updates of omnibus transportation bills called the Main Line of Public Works (1824), the legislation was undertaken with an eye to enhance and better connect eastern settlement's business interests with newer mid-western territories rapidly undergoing population explosions in the Pre-Civil War era. But those manufactories needed a source of heat, and the Northern Pennsylvania Coal Region was barely connected to eastern markets except by pack mule, or only through long and arduous routes down the Susquehanna then overland to Philadelphia.
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.
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.
Mountain Top yard or Penobscot yard is a rail yard in Mountain Top, Pennsylvania. It was built by the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (LC&N) in response to an 1837 bill authorizing a right of way and was established by 1840, at least as a construction camp for the Ashley Planes, in support of the construction of the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad trackage and operations to join the northern Anthracite Coal Region from barge loading docks along the Susquehanna in Pittston, in the Wyoming Valley, with the Lehigh Canal.
There are two types of coal found in Pennsylvania: anthracite, the hard coal found in Northeastern Pennsylvania below the Allegheny Ridge southwest to Harrisburg, and bituminous, the soft coal found west of the Allegheny Front escarpment). Anthracite coal is a natural mineral with a high carbon and energy content that gives off light and heat produced energy when burned, making it useful as a fuel. It was possibly first used in Pennsylvania as a fuel in 1769, but its history begins with a documented discovery near Summit Hill and the founding of the Lehigh Coal Mine Company in 1792 to periodically send expeditions to the wilderness atop Pisgah Ridge to mine the deposits, mostly with notable lack of great success, over the next 22 years.
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. The three lengthy ridges and two valley formations together are literally the first ridges and valleys just south of the Poconos on the opposite side of the Lehigh River—geological formations which contain some of the richest Anthracite coal bearing sedimentary rocks of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Historically, the first Anthracite mines in America were located atop Pisgah Mountain at Summit Hill and caravanned by pack mule through the Mauch Chunk Creek valley. Then the historic Mauch Chunk and Summit Hill Switchback Railroad, the second railway in North America was built along the Pisgah Mountain side of the same valley—and become quite a tourist attraction and is known as the world's first roller coaster, and would inspire others in purpose built amusement parks. The Mauch Chunk and Summit Hill Switchback Railroad became only a tourist road in the 1890s and thrilled riders until it was liquidated in the 1930s, a casualty of the Great depression.
Erskine Hazard (1790-1865), a younger son of the first U.S. Postmaster Ebenezer Hazard, became the partner of Josiah White about 1810 at approximately 19 years old. White and Hazard together established spearheaded efforts that enabled the Industrial Revolution, the advancement of steam power, and of railroading, creating the infrastructure and business climate to accelerate the Northeast U.S. out of an agrarian society to the industrial power that served as a foundation for the rise of the United States as the world's foremost economic power.
The Beaver Meadow Railroad & Coal Company (BMRC) was chartered April 7, 1830, to build a railroad from the mines near Beaver Meadows, Pennsylvania, beyond Broad Mountain along Beaver Creek to Penn Haven and along the Lehigh River through present-day Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania to the Lehigh Canal at Parryville, Pennsylvania. The settlement of Beaver Meadows dated to a 1787 land sale to Patrick and Mary Keene, thence to Nathan Beach.
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 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.