Ashley Planes
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Ashley Planes
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| Location | Off Pennsylvania Route 309, Fairview Township and Hanover Township, Pennsylvania |
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| Coordinates | 41°11′26″N 75°54′37″W / 41.19056°N 75.91028°WCoordinates: 41°11′26″N 75°54′37″W / 41.19056°N 75.91028°W |
| Area | 160.3 acres (64.9 ha) |
| Built | 1837, 1860s, 1909 |
| Built by | Douglas, Edwin A.; LC&N. |
| NRHP Reference # | 80003562 |
| Added to NRHP | January 25, 1980 |
Ashley Planes was a historic freight cable railroad situated along three separately powered inclined plane sections located between Ashley, Pennsylvania at the foot, and via the Solomon cutting the yard in Mountain Top over 1,000 feet (300 m) above and initially built between 1837-38 by Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company's subsidiary Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad (LH&S). One result of the 1837 updates of omnibus transportation bills called the Main Line of Public Works (1824), the legislation was undertaken with an eye to enhance and better connect eastern settlement's business interests with newer mid-western territories rapidly undergoing population explosions in the Pre-Civil War era. But those manufactories needed a source of heat, and the Northern Pennsylvania Coal Region was barely connected to eastern markets except by pack mule, or only through long and arduous routes down the Susquehanna then overland to Philadelphia.
The Ashley Planes job was to join two railroad sections at either elevation and bridge over the drainage divide between the Susquehanna Valley and that of the Lehigh/Delaware valleys. It was purpose-built to join the freight capacity of two canals (The Pennsylvania Canal System, locally the West Susquehanna Division at Pittston and the Lehigh Canal) and via the Susquehanna, connect to other transportation infrastructure between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh—in intent the Planes role in the legislation was 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. More pragmatically, it was designed during the mid-canal era as part of an overall strategic schema to lift heavy freight eastwards out of the Susquehanna Valley in suburban Wilkes-Barre into the eastside descents which gravity aided to the canal head and thence using cheap practical water transport ended feeding much needed coal into all the big coastal cities of the Eastern United States accessible via the Delaware Valley, and indeed to trans-oceanic destinations.
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