Initially built between 1837-38 by LC&N's subsidiary Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad (LH&S) to join two railroad sections purpose-built to join the freight capacity of two canals and other transportation infrastructure between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh—it was designed specifically to connect the seaports of the Delaware River with the new interior settlements of the near-midwest along the tributary rivers of the vast Mississippi River drainage basin.
The corridor makes a nearly direct route to the big eastern cities markets that had been held since 1837-38 by LC&Ns canal operations and its railroad subsidiary, the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad.
In the 1830s the region entered a boom period and began shipping coal by the Pennsylvania Canal, and by the 1840s even down the Lehigh Canal to Allentown, Philadelphia, Trenton, Wilmington, New York City, and other east coast cities and ports via the connecting engineering works of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company such as the upper Lehigh Canal, the Ashley Planes and the early Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad, along with other railroads that flocked to or were born in the area.
Centered in the right bank town of Mauch Chunk the LH&S finally moved with alacrity to connect both its halves.
Historic Mountain Top Yard, or Penobscot Yard in the lee of Penobscot Knob the nearby peak rising to tower over the drainage divide thorough which the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad.
Mountain Top's yard was the upper terminal end of the historic Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad's Ashley Planes funicular railways (1st begun 1837) which lifted freight over the steep climb from the Ashley neighborhood in Hazleton and site of a large Transfer yard bypassed by the former trackage of the Lehigh Valley Railroad and leased to the Central Railroad of New Jersey.
The yard was acquired by Reading Blue Mountain and Northern Railroad in 1996 during the dissolution of Conrail which had acquired the property in 1976 when the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad joined its properties to that ill-fated conglomerate enterprise.
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