Lehigh Valley Railroad HO Scale Models

The Lehigh Valley Railroad traces its origins to 1846, when the Pennsylvania General Assembly authorized a railroad company then called the Delaware, Lehigh, Schuylkill and Susquehanna Railroad to construct a line running parallel to the Lehigh River between Mauch Chunk and Easton, Pennsylvania. The enterprise was formally incorporated in 1847 but made little progress until October 1851, when entrepreneur Asa Packer acquired majority control and brought serious financing and engineering talent to the project. Packer installed Robert H. Sayre as chief engineer, and construction advanced rapidly enough that the first segment between Easton and Allentown opened on June 11, 1855, with the section westward to Mauch Chunk following that September. The company's name was officially changed to Lehigh Valley Railroad on January 7, 1853, reflecting the geographic identity that would define it for well over a century. The railroad adopted the informal nickname Route of the Black Diamond, a reference to anthracite coal, the dense, high-quality fuel that constituted the core of its freight business and the economic rationale for its existence. From its earliest years the Lehigh Valley Railroad functioned as the dominant trunk line through its namesake valley, drawing traffic from numerous feeder railroads that tapped Pennsylvania's Middle Coal Field. The line connected at Mauch Chunk with the Beaver Meadow Railroad, itself linked to collieries at Jeansville, and within two years of opening the railroad was hauling more than 400,000 tons of coal annually. At Easton the railroad crossed the Delaware River on a double-decked bridge into Phillipsburg, New Jersey, where connections with the Central Railroad of New Jersey and the Belvidere Delaware Railroad provided access to markets in Trenton, Newark, and ultimately New York City. During the 1860s the railroad expanded northward to Wilkes-Barre and pushed up the Susquehanna River toward the New York state line, absorbing feeder properties including the Beaver Meadow Railroad and Coal Company and the Penn Haven and White Haven Railroad along the way. The system eventually stretched westward to a terminal at Buffalo, New York, giving the Lehigh Valley Railroad a through route connecting the anthracite fields of Pennsylvania with two of the nation's largest metropolitan markets as well as the Great Lakes gateway. By the end of 1925 the railroad controlled approximately 1,364 miles of road and more than 3,500 miles of track, supported by major shop facilities consolidated at Sayre, Pennsylvania, near the New York state border, and freight car shops at Packerton in the coal region. The twentieth century brought gradual decline as anthracite demand softened, highway competition intensified, and the broader financial difficulties that plagued northeastern railroading took hold. The railroad operated its celebrated Black Diamond passenger express between New York and Buffalo, a train that embodied the road's aspirations as more than a coal hauler, but freight revenue remained the foundation of the business and that foundation eroded steadily. By 1970 the system had contracted to roughly 927 miles of road. The Lehigh Valley Railroad ceased independent operations in 1976 when it was folded into Conrail, the federally sponsored consolidation that absorbed most of the troubled northeastern carriers that same year. Conrail continued to use the former Lehigh Valley main line as an important corridor into the New York metropolitan area, designating it the Lehigh Line, though it soon abandoned most of the western extension into New York state toward Buffalo. When Conrail itself was divided in 1999, the majority of the former Lehigh Valley route in eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey passed to Norfolk Southern Railway, which continues to operate it as part of its Lehigh Line. A shorter segment between Manville and Newark in New Jersey is operated by Conrail Shared Assets Operations. The railroad's legacy endures in the infrastructure it built through one of the most industrially significant corridors in American history.