Railroads got coal to market

Lehigh Valley station in Hazleton

One hundred years ago, railroads were the lifeblood of the Hazleton area. In Weatherly alone, 100 trains were dispatched out of the Weatherly depot every day.

The growth of the railroads was due in large part to Asa Packer, who built his fortune building and operating barges and canals and imining coal in the 1830s and 40s.

Without the railroads, the coal industry would never have grown. In the early days coal was taken to the big Philadelphia market by canal. Horse-drawn wagons, used to haul coal on the Lehigh & Susquehanna Turnpike through Hazleton, were just too slow. In 1827, the Lehigh Navigation & Coal Co. constructed a nine-mile rail line from its mines at Summit Hill to a canal system at the Lehigh River.

It was called a gravity railroad because that's how coal cars, using pulleys and cables, got down the mountain. Mules rode down in the cars and then pulled them back up. Packer, although he became rich through his canal businesses, took control of the Lehigh Navigation company in 1851 to oversee the construction of a railroad from Jim Thorpe to Easton that would replace the Lehigh River canal system of transporting coal in barges to market.

Under Packer's leadership, the Lehigh Valley Railroad grew to become a colossal transportation system that stretched from New York City to Lake Erie at Buffalo, N.Y. Along the way the LVRR absorbed many smaller railroads, including two pioneer Hazleton-area companies _ the Beaver Meadows Railroad & Coal Co. and the Hazleton Railroad Co.

The former Lehigh Valley station in Freeland

In 1833, the Beaver Meadows company began building tracks from that community, down inclined planes at the Weatherly hill, and along Quakake Creek to the river at Parryville. For the first run of coal in 1836 the company used mules to haul two trains of 16, three-ton cars from Beaver Meadows mines to Weatherly. Later the coal cars were hitched to two small steam engines that made the trip to Parryville.

A year later, Ario Pardee's Hazleton Coal & Railroad Co. hauled its first anthracite over a 10-mile line from the city to Weatherly, and then over Beaver Meadows Co. lines to Penn Haven. By the end of 1837, the company had transported more than 14,000 tons of coal to canal boats at the Lehigh River.

Other local railroads emerged or merged in the early years, such as the two-mile long Sugar Loaf Railroad in 1839.

,When the Beaver Meadows and Hazleton railroads started operations, their engines were small and primitive, the workdays were long and dangerous, and the pay was lousy. The locomotives were type 4-2-0 and 4-4-0, a wheel arrangement designation that told the size of the engine and determined an engineer's pay (the first figure is the number of front ‘‘pony’’ wheels, the second shows how many big driver wheels an engine had, and the third represents smaller back wheels).

Drivers of small ‘‘yard’’ engines got the lowest salaries, while engineers on the big coal trains received whopping $2 daily paychecks. The first steam engines had no tops, and many times crewmen halted their trains in the mountains between Hazleton and the Lehigh River to duck under rock overhangs in rain or snow storms. The mountains also provided fuel when the trainmen ran out of wood and had to scour the forest for fallen branches. Danger came from many directions.

Before a Beaver Meadows mechanic invented a firebox grate that allowed engines to burn coal, flying sparks from burning wood often landed on a crewman's clothes, burning them off his back. This led to another local invention. According to Weatherly historian Jack Koehler, the Beaver Meadows Railroad was the first railroad to design and use a caboose for the protection of its crew.

,Crashes were common in those days. Often trains would lose their brakes coming down the Weatherly hill, rush through the town and then derail at the curve along Hazle Creek.

One amazing crash in 1907 happened when a train's crew had stopped at the top of the Weatherly hill to check their timetable, and the train started rolling with no one aboard. The train sailed down the hill and derailed at the first turn coming into town, but it stayed on course with its wheels banging on the wooden ties until it hit the road crossing in the middle of town and re-railed itself, averting a disastrous wreck in Weatherly. The empty train finally crashed at the curve below town.

Accidents weren't limited to steam locomotives. From 1903 to 1933, the Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton Railway Co. operated daily electric trolleys on a 21-mile stretch between the two Luzerne County cities (its terminal was across the street from the‚Standard-Speaker building, and a bridge abutment for the line can still be seen at Fritzingertown).

On a clear May day in 1928, a motorman and conductor coming from Hazleton on a different trolley because they had both overslept forgot that they were supposed to stop at a St. Johns siding to let a southbound trolley through. The trolleys slammed into each other head-on, but the passengers, two conductors and a motorman escaped as 625 volts from the third rail continued to pump power into the cars, creating a fire. The motorman of the northbound trolley was trapped in his car, and he burned to death as stunned passengers watched, unable to help

Passenger service in the Hazleton area was handled by the Coxe brothers. With the expansion of rail service, train stations became hubs of the transportation industry. Stations like the ones between Laurel and Church streets in Hazleton and in downtown Weatherly were often as busy, on a smaller scale, as airport terminals are today.

Railroading's expansion was halted temporarily by the Depression, but the boom years continued with what cured many of the country's economic woes _ World War II.

In those days, trains around Hazleton were a common sight as the Lehigh Valley Railroad, Pennsylvania Railroad and New Jersey Central made their daily passenger and freight stops in the city and surrounding towns.

With the rise in popularity of automobiles, trucks and airplanes, the railroad industry started to go downhill in 1957, Koehler said, and by the time the last Lehigh Valley passenger train traveled through Hazleton on Feb. 3, 1961, railroading's decline was on a runaway track. The industry's problems were fueled by the government, which subsidized highways, the trucking industry and the airlines. The major railroad companies, complacent because of their long-time transportation monopoly, hurt themselves by investing in things like real estate instead of their decaying tracks.

On March 31, 1976, the Lehigh Valley Railroad became Conrail property.