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The narrow gauge Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway, or Mauch Chunk & Summit Hill Railway, was built in 1827 by the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (LC&N) and ran for over a hundred years until the middle days of the Great Depression. It was the second operational United States railroad. In its last five decades of operation, it served primarily as a tourist attraction. Begun as a one way gravity railroad that connected Mauch Chunk (now Jim Thorpe) and Summit Hill, PA servicing the site of one of the earliest commercial anthracite (coal) mines in Pennsylvania with freight and passenger services, the early road required mules to return its four-ton coal cars to the top which took over four hours. Subsequently, the road would send down groups of 6-8 coal cars under control of a brakeman, and once 40-42 cars were down, send down the special "mule cars" with the draft animals, thus having just enough animals to return all cars back to the top. The road gradually became a popular sensation— a weekend travel destination for the well to do to visit and soon, with the earliest for-pay riders documented in 1829, began to carry passengers some of the time over the somewhat exciting descent. As a coal road, product demand had grown steadily and eventually the return-by-mule railway could not keep up with throughput demands even operating three shifts, so despite some difficult engineering, the railroad was mutated to incorporate a new cable railway return loop in 1846 so became a gravity-incline combination railway. A powered double incline plane road lead up to the top of two separate summits along Pisgah Ridge on the return leg (See "up track" on the map at right) and each summit had a down track returning the cars several miles farther west in each case. About the same time, when other mine heads were opened in lower elevations of the Panther Creek valley LC&N added several descending switchback sections and other cable railway inclines to bring the coal up to the Summit Hill loading area for the railway trip down to the Lehigh Canal and their clamoring customers. The railroad became an early American tourist attraction and is considered as the world's first roller coaster, a role it would keep and satisfy with tourists for over five decades after it was abandoned as a primary freight railroad. ==Background== Lehigh Coal Mining Company (LCMC) had acquired lands around Summit Hill in 1792, a year after coal was discovered on the mountain. Transportation of bulk goods was a difficult problem as the United States did not have many developed roadways or waterways. LCMC had only sporadic success getting coal to industrialists in the Allentown-Philadelphia market, mule training the coal down to the Lehigh at several points in the Mauch Chunk Creek valley or crossing south over the Mauch Chunk Ridge to the Lehigh River at the Mahoning Hills near Lehighton, only to have many loads run afoul of river rapids and sink. The ineptitude of the LCMC to keep reliable regular deliveries would prove to be a historic turning point. Services being unreliable, in 1818 inspired by the media coverage about the Erie Canal (begun 1817) and fed up with LCMC's delivery reliability, industrialists interested in securing a reliable coal supply bought the operating rights (leased) the company, and shortly after secured other investors forming as well the Lehigh Navigation Company, resolved to apply the high tech of the Canal Era (canals, locks, rails) to bringing coal to their foundries and the stoves and furnaces of Philadelphia and beyond. The mule roads used by the former management were quickly improved or replaced after a systematic survey, and work began nearly as rapidly on channels, locks and dams to tame the rocky Lehigh River with a canal. By mid-1820 the coal produced by new mining management was regularly and reliably servicing a growing customer base, but reliant on pack mule transport over the haul from Summit Hill to the coal chutes installed at Mauch Chunk, the town that became today's Jim Thorpe (which now also includes the town that was East Mauch Chunk on the east or left bank Lehigh River). In 1822 the two companies were merged, and by 1824 the improvements along the pack mule trail, in the mines, and especially because of the Lehigh Navigation the company had built between 1818-1823; coal was flowing out of the companies mines around Summit Hill and the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company's Lehigh Canal was regularly increasing coal shipped to the Delaware Canal through which it also fed prodigious amounts of coal. Having had an eye for high-tech from the outset, the LC&N company's founders decided to try some of the railroad solutions put into place in England around Coalbrookdale, which birthed not only railroads, but both the steam locomotive, and the fixed cable winch engines which were used in many steep grades as well as for mining hoists. The railroad company, a subsidiary of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (LC&N or 'Old Company'), eventually became part of the storied Central Railroad of New Jersey (CNJ) when the Old Company divested its railroad holdings and leased out or sold most of its subsidiary railroad companies, part of whose traffic, was tourists visiting from Philadelphia to ride the novel and exciting ramshackle gravity railroad with its scenic mountain ridge view. CNJ later sold the tourist attraction to the newly formed Mauch Chunk, Summit Hill Switch-Back Railway Company. After abandoning freight operations in 1933, the railroad survived until 1938 as an early roller coaster. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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