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Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton Railway By E J Quinby SOFT COVER SEALED IN PLASTIC
Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton Railway By E J Quinby
SOFT COVER
Copyright 1972
86 pages
The wild mountainous region in Pennsylvania between Hazleton and Wilkes-Barre is just about the most unlikely area where one might expect to find an interurban railroad operating. So many are the obvious problems which would confront any railroad builder in that rugged wilderness that it is no wonder the experienced engineers who laid out the Pennsylvania Railroad gave it a wide berth. Rather than tackle the three mountain ranges that intervene between Hazleton and Wilkes-Barre, where the distance as the crow flies is actually only 21 miles, they chose instead a 50 mile detour following the natural path to the Westward carved out by the Susquehanna River. In like manner, the builders of the Lehigh Valley Railroad and the Central Railroad of New Jersey shied away from any attempt at a direct route, and they selected as an alternative a route following the valley of the Lehigh River, resulting in another 50 mile detour, to the Eastward.
Like the country around Wilkes-Barre, the Hazleton area attracted the coal mining industry, and Hazleton with its many suburban satellites soon boasted a population of over 90,000. The promoters of the Lehigh Traction Company built suburban trolley lines fanning out from Hazleton to reach the communities of Jeansville, Tresckow, Audenried and McAdoo to the South, and Harleigh, Latimer, Milnesville, Eberville, Oakdale, Drifton and Freeland to the North and East. Each of these suburban towns had sprung up because of the coal deposits that reposed beneath them, and each had attracted a growing population of coal miners. And of course the railroads had extended freight branches to reach these mines by devious routes, often involving steep grades and switchbacks over which ponderous, powerful steam locomotives struggled up with strings of empties and rolled down with lengthy drags loaded with the black diamonds.
The same was true of the area around Wilkes-Barre to the North, where the bigger city grew and prospered. And still farther to the North was the coal city of Scranton, boasting a still larger population, with coal mines in the intervening and surrounding territory.
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