Getting anthracite coal out of the ground was one thing, but getting this new fuel to market in Philadelphia in its early days was quite another.
The Schuylkill Navigation System, a series of canals and sections of the Schuylkill River, was chartered in 1815, only 25 years after Necho Allen discovered coal near Pottsville.
The waterway connecting Port Carbon to Philadelphia sparked the growth of coal mining in Schuylkill County. From Philadelphia, coal could reach New Jersey, New York and major East Coast markets that were undergoing an energy crisis.
Transporting coal by water, however, was slow and unreliable. Floods and the winter freeze hampered delivery as demand for coal increased.
Railroads would replace the canal system in relatively short order.
The Little Schuylkill Navigation Railroad shuttled coal from the Tamaqua area to Port Clinton. And by the early 1840s, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad ran a line from Reading to Mount Carbon.
It could be argued that railroads made the coal industry. Or, maybe it was the other way around.
Regardless, the boundless appetite for energy brought on by the Industrial Revolution turned the Reading Company — parent of the railroad and coal company — into the largest corporation in the world by the early 1870s.
When it came to coal, there wasn’t much that the Reading Railroad couldn’t do.
And, 100 years ago this winter, that included changing the course of the Schuylkill River.
An article by George Legler provides a detailed account of how the railroad altered the channel of the river below Port Clinton.
The Reading’s president, Agnew T. Dice, accepted a plan to realign the river in 1923, and construction began in January 1924.
It would take two years, but the course the river followed for thousands of years was permanently altered to make it quicker and cheaper to get hard coal to market.
Flowing southward from Port Clinton, the river ran into a hard rock mountainside above Hamburg. The river would carve a path over eons, but the rocky obstacle created a horseshoe-shaped, “U” in its course.
Initially, coming north from Hamburg on the Berks County side of the river, the railroad went around the outer rim of the upside-down U by driving a tunnel through Pulpit Rock. (Yes, the same ‘Rock’ strata the state has closed off to swimmers.)
In the 1880s, the railroad built two bridges across the U, creating a more direct link between Hamburg and Port Clinton.
In 1924, the railroad eliminated the U in the river by redirecting its channel. In effect, a new channel was dug, and the displaced rock and earth was used to fill in the old one.
A narrow gauge railroad was built to move the huge amount of material excavated. A fleet of six locomotives and 40 cars were used to haul the material. Extensive blasting was necessary to loosen the rock, and two 70-ton and four 20-ton steam-powered shovels were needed to dig it out.
Because of the hardness of the rock, the average life of the teeth on the shovel buckets was five to 10 working days.
“With all the digging, plus the regular freight and passenger moves over the existing railroad,” Legler wrote, “it must have been a sight to watch for the residents of Port Clinton.”
After 28 months of activity, the Reading Railroad put its new southbound line into service on May 16, 1926, and the northbound line on May 25.
The line is still in use by the Reading & Northern Railroad in Port Clinton, which replaced the Reading Railroad as a major transporter of anthracite coal.
Source: Berkshire mont
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