Allentown Railroad
| Locale | Lehigh County, Pennsylvania and Berks County, Pennsylvania |
|---|---|
| Dates of operation | 1870–December 31, 1945 |
| Successor | Reading Company |
| Track gauge | 4 ft 8 1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge |
| Headquarters | Reading |
The Allentown Railroad was a rail line proposed in the 1850s to connect the Central Railroad of New Jersey at Allentown with the Pennsylvania Railroad's main line across the Allegheny Mountains. Though grading was almost entirely finished, the project was halted by the Panic of 1857, and the completion of the East Pennsylvania Railroad in 1859 made the Allentown Railroad's proposed line largely redundant. As a result, track was never laid on most of the line. The small portion that did became a branchline of the Reading Company from Topton to Kutztown, and was nominally owned by the Allentown Railroad until the Reading dissolved it in 1945 to simplify corporate bookkeeping. Other Reading subsidiaries also laid track on parts of the right-of-way elsewhere along the route.
The CNJ had reached Phillipsburg in 1852, on the outskirts of the Lehigh Valley, and anticipated extension to Allentown. If a direct route could be built from Allentown to the Susquehanna, western traffic could reach New York faster by this route than by detouring through Philadelphia and coming north over the Camden and Amboy Railroad.
Such a route would run parallel to the mountains in the region, and a lateral coal railroad already extended west from the Susquehanna. The Dauphin and Susquehanna Coal Company connected with the PRR at Rockville (where their main line crossed the Susquehanna), ran north along the river to Dauphin, and turned northeast to run up Stony Valley to the Rausch Gap coal mines. It proved to be a willing partner in the plan.
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