Ashley Planes

About this property

Ashley Planes was a historic freight cable railroad in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. They consisted of three separately powered inclined-plane sections between Ashley, Pennsylvania, at the foot, and via the Solomon cutting the yard in Mountain Top more than 1,000 feet (300 m) higher. They were built in 1837 and 1838 by the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad (L&S), a subsidiary of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company. In the 1830s, Eastern business interests sought better connections to rapidly growing Midwestern territories. They also sought better ways to bring coal from the Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania, which could only be hauled by pack mule overland, or only through long and arduous routes down the Susquehanna River and thence to Philadelphia. The 1837 updates to the 1824 Main Line of Public Works legislation prescribed the Ashley Planes to move anthracite coal from the Wyoming Valley eastward over the ridge to the Lehigh Valley, where it could descend by gravity to the canal head and continue by water to Philadelphia, other Atlantic seaports, and export markets. Located near Wilkes-Barre, the Planes would join two railroad sections and bridge the drainage divide between the Susquehanna Valley and that of the Lehigh and Delaware Valleys. It was built to join the freight capacity of two canals, the Pennsylvania Canal system, locally the West Susquehanna Division at Pittston, and an extension of the Lehigh Canal. The Planes linked Pittsburgh, the Ohio River, and the Midwest to the eastern coastal cities via Pennsylvania's canal system and later, other railroads, the shortest path at the time. The Planes sent goods and passengers west and via Mountain Top by rail to White Haven. The incline railroads were located at Fairview Township and Hanover Township. Before and after loading, coal hoppers would be staged from the Central Railroad of New Jersey's (CNJ) Mountain Top Yard, which was leased from LH&S from the 1870s in nearby Mountain Top, Pennsylvania. The three railroads were built in 1837, the 1860s, and 1909, and feature a stationary power source using cable winding and winching and cars traveling down as a counterweight to a car being lifted on parallel tracks. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The thousand-foot lift of the cable railway was not continuous. The initial two and later three sections of the Ashley Planes railroad could operate as a funicular railroad or a cable railroad, for its hoist houses all used a pusher cart called a "barney" hooked into a continuous cable in the same way as a modern ski lift uses a continuous cable.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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