Mountain Top yard or Penobscot yard is a rail yard in Mountain Top, Pennsylvania. It was built by the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (LC&N) in response to an 1837 bill authorizing a right of way and was established by 1840, at least as a construction camp for the Ashley Planes, in support of the construction of the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad trackage and operations to join the northern Anthracite Coal Region from barge loading docks along the Susquehanna (above and below the Navigations of the Pennsylvania Canal) in Pittston in the Wyoming Valley with the Lehigh Canal.
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Historical backdrop
Penobscot Knob or Mount Penobscot looming above the local terrain was one of the last terrain obstacles to north-south travel — following after several barrier ranges in the ridge-and-valley Appalachians above the improvements to the Lehigh River allowing water transport over 80 miles inland from Philadelphia's piers — a barrier therefore preventing west to east shipping of coal in the fading days of the canal era, but one in which railroad technology was leaping ahead year by year. LC&N, a high-tech company and major corporation of the 1820s-1870s, had already built the Lehigh Canal and the country's second railroad, the Mauch Chunk & Summit Hill Railroad to ship coal the ten miles of gravity railroad to the loading facility above the head end of the improved Navigations Lehigh River and the Delaware Canal and Delaware River.
Geography
Mountain Top, Pennsylvania, is a railroad town once named Penobscot, built beside the yard to house its employees and those of the nearby mines. The town is located at 41°8′7″N 75°54′16″W (41.1353022, -75.9044749) in the shadow of Mount Penobscot (or Penobscot Knob) and is located in the saddle-shaped mountain pass atop the ridgeline between the Susquehanna River basin to the north and west and the Lehigh River basin to the east and south, so sits astride an important land communications corridor bridging the two watersheds below. It is 8 miles (13 km) northwest of White Haven at the head end of the Lehigh River gorge and in the heights above Hazleton, Pennsylvania, 10 miles (16 km) south of Wilkes-Barre on Pennsylvania Route 309. Consequently, even though regional railroads are much diminished in scope and influence, Mountain Top yard, once used as a marshaling yard at the top of the Ashley Planes funicular (cable driven) railway, is still an important regional element of the transportation infrastructure connecting Allentown and Philadelphia with points north and west via trackage to several yards in New York State. Mountain Top's yard was the upper terminal end of the historic Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad's Ashley Planes funicular railways (first begun 1837) which lifted freight over the steep climb from the Ashley neighborhood in Hazleton and site of a large transfer yard bypassed by the former trackage of the Lehigh Valley Railroad and leased to the Central Railroad of New Jersey.
Mountain Top is elevated at 1,558 feet (475 m) above sea level.