(.2 cu. The owners still owned the property, but the railroad was allowed to conduct agreed-upon activities on the swath in question. [6], The LVRR immediately became the trunk line down the Lehigh Valley, with numerous feeder railroads connecting and contributing to its traffic. The route across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Oak Island Yard remains important to the Norfolk Southern Railway and CSX Transportation today, the only two Class 1 railroads that are based in the Eastern United States. Some of the lines and branches covered in the series'twenty-four boxes include: For maps of the routes and land holdings of the Lehigh and New England Railroad, the series So, its motto, Route Of The Black Diamond, was quite befitting and led directly to both its rise in prosperity and downfall into bankruptcy. Lehigh Valley Terminal Railway - Wikipedia Other resolutions: 320 240 pixels | 640 480 pixels | 1,024 768 pixels | 1,280 960 pixels | 2,560 1,920 pixels. Three months later the line branched out to the northwest past Allentown to Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, on September 12, 1855. The 46-mile-long (74km) LVRR connected at Mauch Chunk with the Beaver Meadow Railroad. The majority of passenger equipment is believed to have been scrapped some time after February 1961. ft.), Susquehanna and Clearfield Railroad / Annual Report to the Auditor General of Pennsylvania, 1895-1896. ft.), PRR / VP of Real Estate / General Correspondence Files of the St. Lawrence Power Project, 1948-1954. w/ Val. (.1 cu. The LVRR, which had built coal docks in Perth Amboy when it built the Easton and Amboy in the 1870s, desired a terminal on the Hudson River close to New York City. [24] The marshalling yard is now the residential area known as Harbortown. ft.), PRR / VP of Purchase / General Correspondence and Confidential Files of C.D. Post Conrail ownership and secondary lines. Indicates major drainage, cities and towns, and names the railroads along the lines. ft.), PRR / President / Presidential Correspondence of M.W. (.2 cu. Most of the rail equipment went to Conrail as well, but 24 locomotives (units GP38-2 314-325 and C420 404415) went to the Delaware & Hudson instead. ft.), PRR / Secretary / Pamphlet Description of Corporations in which PRR and Subs. (92 cu. (25 cu. ft.), Northern Central Railroad / Committee Minute Book, 1875-1914. Ousting President Elisha P. Wilbur and several directors in 1897, the Morgan company installed W. Alfred Walter as president and seated its own directors. (2 cu. [28] LVRR subsidiary, Lehigh Valley Railway began constructing the main line's northern part from Buffalo to Lancaster, New York, in 1883, a total distance of ten miles. In 1875, the LVRR financed the addition of a third rail to the Erie Railroad main line so that cars could roll directly from colliery to the port at Buffalo. (5 cu. It was opened on June 11, 1855, between Easton, Pennsylvania, and Allentown, Pennsylvania, passing through Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad - Wikipedia The purpose of the Temple Iron Company was to lock-up independent coal production and control the supply. The line was later extended out to the northwest past Jim Thorpe to the Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, area and later it reached the Buffalo, New York, area and past Easton all the way to Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and then switched direction to the northeast to Jersey City, New Jersey, later cut back to Newark, New Jersey. (.01 cu. On January 7, 1853, the railroad's name was changed to Lehigh Valley Railroad. That project failed, but the lands were later used for the LVRR's own terminal in 1889. ft.), Manor Real Estate and Trust Company / Property Ledger, 1886-1916. 1902 - NYC introduces The 20th Century Limited. ft.), PRR / VP of Special Services / Merger Testimony and Exhibits, 1962-1967. (.25 cu. (3 cu. (.5 cu. ft.), PRR / VP of Operation / Chief of Motive Power / Letter Books, 1926. The original maps were never transferred to the Archives, but a book by book inventory of the film exists. By 1869, the LVRR owned a continuous track through Pennsylvania from Easton to Waverly. The Maple Leaf and the John Wilkes were the last operating long-distance trains, terminated that day. N Scale Lehigh Valley locomotive by Life-Like. File usage on Commons. Although the heavy wartime traffic had left the railroad's plant and equipment in need of repair, the damage was partly offset by new equipment that had been purchased by the government. ft.), PRR / Secretary / Information Books, ca 1926-1954. In 1896 the very early film Black Diamond Express was produced by Thomas A. Edison's company Kinetoscope. [4] All this changed in October 1851, when Asa Packer took majority control of the DLS&S. Lehigh Line (Norfolk Southern) - Wikipedia First, it purchased a large parcel of land in Buffalo, the Tifft farm, for use as terminal facilities, and obtained a New York charter for the Lehigh Valley Railway (a similar name to the LVRR, but with "railway" instead). (.1 cu. (.1 cu. ft.), Pittsburgh, Chartiers and Yougheogheny Railway / Annual Reports, 1892-1910. For 25 years the Lehigh Canal had enjoyed a monopoly on downstream transportation and was charging independent producers high fees. The line was laid with a rail weighing 56 pounds per yard supported upon cross ties 6 x 7 inches and 7-1/2 feet long placed 2 feet apart and about a quarter of it was ballasted with stone or gravel. [14], The 1870s witnessed commencement of extension of the LVRR in a new direction. (.01 cu. (1 cu. In the years leading to 1973, the freight railroad system in the northeast of the U.S. was collapsing. ft.), PRR / Secretary / Corporate Histories Prepared in Accord. [30] As a result of its leases and acquisitions, the Lehigh Valley gained a near-monopoly on traffic in the Finger Lakes region. Most serviceable equipment not retained for company service was sold to other roads. ft.), PRR / VP of Eastern Region / Locality Files, 1918-1936. [44] In 1957, the LVRR again stopped dividends. [18] For most of its length, it ran parallel to the LVRR. [2][13] By 1893, the LVRR owned or controlled 53,000 acres (210km2) of coal lands. Since 1896 the LVRR had run an important and prestigious express train named the "Black Diamond" which carried passengers to the Finger Lakes and Buffalo. ft.), PRR / VP of Operation / Chief of Motive Power / Miscellaneous Motive Power Blueprints and Related Materials, ca 1900-1968. The Easton and Amboy had already completed large docks and facilities for shipping coal at Perth Amboy upon an extensive tract of land fronting the Arthur Kill. The two roads had entered a shared trackage agreement in this area in 1965 to reduce costs, as both had parallel routes from Wilkes-Barre virtually all the way to metropolitan New York, often on adjoining grades through Pennsylvania. The tracks from Dupont to Mehoopany became a new rail line called the Susquehanna Branch. ft.), Suquehanna, Bloomsburg, and Berwick Railroad - Ledger, 1902-1904. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for LV Lehigh Valley Railroad Depot (train station) at Andreas, Schuylkill Co., PA at the best online prices at eBay! In the following year, the LVRRa standard gauge railroadcompleted arrangements with the Erie Railroad, at that time having a six-foot gauge, for a third rail within the Erie mainline tracks to enable the LV equipment to run through to Elmira and later to Buffalo. A long segment west from Van Etten Junction to Buffalo was included in the Conrail takeover, but was mostly torn-up not long afterward. permission to lay track, run trains and do needed maintenance along a long, narrow swath. The Vosburg Tunnel was completed and opened for service on July 25, 1886. From 1855 to 1879 the Lehigh Valley Railroad had grown from its original road between Mauch Chunk and Easton, to include 658 miles of track as far away as Buffalo and New York City. LEHIGH VALLEY DEPOT - WILLIAMSVILLE, NEW YORK - TrainWeb.org (.1 cu. Morgan. Dates / Origin Date Issued: 1887 Place: Philadelphia? ft.), PRR / Secretary / Pennsylvania Railroad and Long Island RR Directors' Inspection Trip Book, 1947. At Phillipsburg, New Jersey, the line interchanges with its New Jersey side branch line, the Washington Secondary and the Belvidere and Delaware River Railway which also passes over the Belvidere and Delaware River after that. Clement, 1935-1949. (.55 cu. ft.), PRR / President / Presidential Correspondence of W.W. Atterbury, 1925-1935. The 16 mile mountain cut-of, a rail segment of the line that extended from Fairview, Pennsylvania, to the outskirts of Pittston, Pennsylvania, was completed in November 1888. 1835-1925]. Then and now: Passenger railway stations and round houses in the Lehigh In 1901, Morgan arranged to have the Packer Estate's holdings purchased jointly by the Erie, the Pennsylvania, the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway, the DL&W and the CNJ, all companies in which Morgan had interests. The line later expanded past Allentown to Lehigh Valley Terminal in Buffalo and past Easton to New York City, bringing the Lehigh Valley Railroad to these metropolitan areas. [3], Little occurred between 1847 and 1851, save some limited grading near Allentown, Pennsylvania. The line is still owned and operated by the Norfolk Southern Railway and the line still runs from Port Reading Junction in Manville, New Jersey, to Penn Haven Junction in Lehigh Township, Carbon County, Pennsylvania.[52]. (.02 cu. Newly elected president Eben B. Thomas, formerly of the Erie, and his board of directors represented the combined interests of those railroads.[36]. ft.), North Penn Coal Company / Minute Book, 1913-1938. ft.), Philadelphia and Erie Railroad / Agreement Book, 1853-1894. (6.5 cu. Lehigh Valley Railroad 4-6-2 K-6B steam locomotive 2097 decorated for the railroad's centennial and leading the second section of train 9, the "Black Diamond," with ten cars past the interlocking tower at Treichler, a railroad location in North Whitehall Township, Pennsylvania, on April 20, 1946. The LVRR found that the route of the Morris Canal was impractical for use as a railroad line, so in 1872 the LVRR purchased the dormant charter of the Perth Amboy and Bound Brook Railroad which had access to the Perth Amboy, New Jersey, harbor, and added to it a new charter, the Bound Brook and Easton Railroad. ft.), Manor Real Estate and Trust Company / Journals, 1886-1929. Wilson, Chief Engineer, 1881-1884. This route became important to Conrail as an alternate route to avoid Amtrak's former PRR/PC Northeast Corridor electrified route. 1951: September 14: Last day of steam on the Lehigh Valley Railroad as. In order to document their corporate valuations to the ICC, American railroad companies had to submit detailed maps of their real estate holdings. This page was last edited on 26 February 2023, at 16:09. The remainder of the assets were disposed of by the estate until it was folded into the non-railroad Penn Central Corporation in the early 1980s. The line's being downsized three times created two new rail lines: the Lehigh Secondary and the Lehigh Division, which was later sold to the Reading Blue Mountain and Northern Railroad (RBMN) in 1996; the RBMN would later cut back the Lehigh Division from Mehoopany to Dupont, Pennsylvania. ft.), PRR / VP of Special Services / Merger Studies, 1950-1970. (.5 cu. (3 cu. railroad archivist. (.3 cu. Lehigh Valley Trail - TrailLink: Trail Maps & Guide for Biking, Hiking [16] After the LVRR opened its line, the Lehigh & Susquehanna extended to Phillipsburg, New Jersey, and connected with the CNJ and the Morris and Essex Railroad in 1868. (5 cu. This series primarily represents agreements that the PRR entered into with individuals, companies, and local governments. In 1866, two years after the purchase of the Penn Haven and White Haven, the extension from White Haven to Wilkes-Barre opened.[1]. A long series of antitrust investigations and lawsuits resulted, culminating in a 1911 Supreme Court decision that forced the LVRR to divest itself of the coal companies it had held since 1868. In some cases (yards, stations, repair facilities, etc.) ft.), PRR / VP of Real Estate / Annual Reports and Data, 1920-1933. Ball, Chief Conveyancer and Benjamin W. Carskaddon, Assistant Real Estate Agent, 1876-1902. 1860-1878] (1 volume) {#286m.1525} which shows track layouts and property ownership along the tracks for what later became part of the Conemaugh Division of the PRR in northwestern Pennsylvania. Throughout that decade, expansions continued into New York by taking over smaller lines and building new railroad. The Easton and Amboy was used as a connection to the New York metropolitan area, with a terminus in Jersey City, New Jersey. ft.), Bell's Gap Railroad / Annual Reports, 1873-1889. Conrail integrated former CNJ main line leased trackage into the line and kept the line in continuous operation (since 1855); however, it downsized the line in the northwest from the Buffalo area of New York State: first to Sayre Yard in Sayre, Pennsylvania; then to Mehoopany, Pennsylvania; and finally to Penn Haven Junction in Lehigh Township, Carbon County, Pennsylvania. 6 Replies 6377 Views by lvrr325 Fri Aug 28, 2015 3:20 pm: (.1 cu. ft.), Peoria and Eastern Railway / Annual Reports, 1928-1936, 1938-1961, 1963-1966, 1970-1973, 1976. The coal trade was always the backbone of the business but was subject to boom and bust as competition and production increased and the economy cycled. Although the decade began with the completion of its terminals at Buffalo and Jersey City, and the establishment of a trunk line across New York, the company soon became entangled in costly business dealings which ultimately led to the Packer family's loss of control. It passes through the approximately 5,000-foot Pattenburg Tunnel in West Portal, New Jersey, along its route. ft.), Enola Realty Company / Journals, 1905-1932. The Depression had been difficult for all the railroads, and Congress recognized that bankruptcy laws needed revision. Summary Outline map of the middle Atlantic states showing the three major lines in different colors. (.1 cu. The Geneva, Ithaca & Athens Railroad passed into the hands of the LVRR in September 1876, which extended from the New York state line near Sayre, Pennsylvania, to Geneva, New York, a distance of 75 miles. These maps, bridge and structure drawings remains unprocessed. Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway | Train Rides in Jim Thorpe, PA LVRR Map 1 2016-08-10T14:17:31 . ft.), Valley Real Estate Company - Ledger, 1907-1922. Additional passenger trains ran from Philadelphia to Scranton and westward. This allowed the line's eastbound grade to be reduced and a shorter route for handling through traffic established. In pursuit of that strategy, the 1868 purchases of the Hazleton Railroad and the Lehigh Luzerne Railroad brought 1,800 acres (7.3km2) of coal land to the LVRR, and additional lands were acquired along branches of the LVRR. (1.25 cu. I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following license: (SVG file, nominally 800 600 pixels, file size: 447 KB), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:JimIrwin, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Lehigh_Valley_Railroad_System_Map.svg&oldid=460606778, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. The first such combination occurred in 1873, followed by others in 1878, 1884, and 1886. ft.), PRR / President / Clement / Eastern Region Coordinating Committee Files, 1933-1936. Passengers were routed to the Pennsylvania Railroad's terminal and ferry. The "T" intersection is also visible on the map where the trains would turn into the depot at the village of Hemlock. The land that Asa Packer had obtained in 1872 was situated on the southern side of the Morris Canal's South Basin, but the CNJ already had its own facilities adjacent to that property and disputed the LVRR's title, which partly overlapped land the CNJ had filled for its own terminal.[33]. By controlling supply, the coal combination attempted to keep prices and profits high. (2 cu. This imbalance in payments would prove fatal to the financially-frail Lehigh Valley, and it declared bankruptcy just over one month after the Penn Central, on July 24, 1970. That southern field held the largest reserves of anthracite in Pennsylvania and accounted for a large percentage of the total production. Finally after settling the legal issues, the Newark Bay was bridged in 1892 by the Jersey City, Newark and Western Railway and connected to the National Docks Railway, which was partly owned by the LVRR and which reached the LVRR's terminal. The Beaver Meadow Railroad had been built in 1836, and it transported anthracite coal from Jeansville in Pennsylvania's Middle Coal Field to the Lehigh Canal at Mauch Chunk. The two most popular reasons for wishing to consult railroad-related land records are property ownership investigations and historical research. (.1 cu. In 1871, the LVRR leased the Morris Canal, which had a valuable outlet in Jersey City on the Hudson River opposite Manhattan. [14] A year later, Harry Packer died of illness, and Asa's 51-year-old nephew Elisha Packer Wilbur was elected president, a position he held for 13 years.[27]. The LVRR first attempted to obtain a right of way at Greenville, but the Pennsylvania Railroad checkmated them by purchasing most of the properties needed. The Lehigh Valley Railroad's original and primary route between Easton and Allentown was built in 1855. ft.), Erie Railroad / Miscellaneous Land Records, [ca. Although the 1864 acquisition of the Beaver Meadow had included a few hundred acres of coal land, by 1868 the LVRR was feeling pressure from the Delaware and Hudson and the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad in the northern Wyoming Valley coal field, where the railroads mined and transported their own coal at a much reduced cost. (.02 cu. At the end of that time period, the use rights would have to be re-negotiated, or full use and control would revert to the current property owner. The existing tracks from Manville to Newark became a new rail line and Norfolk Southern along with CSX own it under a joint venture. ft.), Germantown, Norristown, and Phoenixville Railroad / Minute Book, 1881-1886. ft.), PRR / VP of Operation / Chief of Motive Power / Lines East Age Books (MP 308), ca 1900-1917. It was located along the Hamilton Street Bridge in Allentown. The line connects with Conrail Shared Assets Operations's Lehigh Line (the new rail line) and CSX Transportation's Trenton Subdivision at Port Reading Junction in Manville, New Jersey, and connects with the Reading Blue Mountain and Northern Railroad's Reading Division at Packerton, Pennsylvania, and Reading Blue Mountain and Northern Railroad's Lehigh Division at Lehighton, Pennsylvania (originally M&H Junction near Old Penn Haven, Pennsylvania). At Catasauqua, the Catasauqua and Fogelsville Railroad transported coal, ore, limestone and iron for furnaces of the Thomas Iron Company, the Lehigh Crane Iron Company, the Lehigh Valley Iron Works, the Carbon Iron Company, and others. Then in 1887 the Lehigh Valley Railroad obtained a lease on the Southern Central Railroad (the LVRR previously had trackage rights on the railroad starting in 1870), which had a route from Waverly northward into the Finger Lakes region. The railroad ended operations in 1976 and merged into Conrail along with several northeastern railroads that same year.