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Lehigh Gorge State Park

This is the important northern entrance into the river cut gully or gap between highlands, and was an important barge loading transshipment point on the newly extended upper Lehigh Canal fed initially by a shortline railroad from the Mountain Top yard dating from the 1837 enabling legislation set up to join the Lehigh and Susquehanna Valleys via Mountain Top and the Ashley Planes incline railway.

Mountain Top Yard

Late in 1871, the competing upstarts calling themselves the Lehigh Valley Railroad (LV) established themselves above and across the same pass in 1871 and extended that storied road to Sayre Yard astride the stateline between Waverly, New York and Sayre, Pennsylvania.

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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 yard

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.

Mountain Top Yard

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.

Mountain Top, Pennsylvania

Consequently, even though regional railroads are much diminished in scope and influence, Mountain Top yard, once used as a marshaling yard at the top of the Ashley Planes funicular (cable driven) railway, is still an important regional element of the transportation infrastructure connecting Allentown and Philadelphia with points north and west via trackage to several yards in New York State.

see also