The Mahanoy Plane – the Mother of all Inclined Railroads

In the Coal Mining Region of Pennsylvania, Appalachian valleys from Harrisburg to Scranton contain prized veins of hard, black Anthracite coal.  From the Civil War to the 1940’s, coal was the undisputed King of Fuels in the United States and the world.  For Schuylkill County, there was one big problem, getting all that precious black coal, from 48 separate mines, up and over the long Broad Mountain that separated it from the southern part of the state. From there it would feed hungry steel mills and factories in places like Allentown, Reading and Philadelphia.  Their solution was the Mahanoy Plane

The Coal Barons’ constructed a massive Inclined Railroad in the town of Frackville.

Clearing the forest and laying tracks up the mountain was the easy part.  Tons of power would be needed to hoist the heavy, laden coal cars up the steep mountainside, too steep for a locomotive to pull.  The vertical rise was a daunting 525 feet to the top of the ridge, 28 degrees at its steepest.  So they installed the most powerful steam engines in the world (at the time) at the summit, at the edge of Frackville. The 500 ton engines were part of a massive complex that would be known as The Mahanoy Plane after the valley below.

The Plane was constructed during the Civil War in 1861, primarily by Italian immigrants, and paid for by the READING RAILROAD of Monopoly fame.   It was a true Engineering Marvel with two 6,000 horsepower steam engines hoisting coal cars 2,500 feet up from the Mahanoy valley to Frackville at the top.  The engines held that “most powerful engine” distinction for over 50 years, until surpassed by the large steam engines that moved the locks of the Panama Canal. 

Cheap immigrant labor toiled and died in the hundreds of deep mines that dotted the Appalachian valleys.  Immigrants were from Ireland, Poland, Russia, Italy, Lithuania, and Ukraine. It was an exhausting, thankless, often dangerous life, long before the days of organized labor unions.  Men would come out of the mines each day with black faces and black lungs. They were paid not in dollars but company currency which they could then used to pay their rent in company owned houses and buy food in company owned stores.

During its heyday, the Mahanoy Plane hoisted over 1.4 Billion, that’s with a B, tons of coal up the steep slope of Broad Mountain.  Up to 900 railroad cars passed up and down the steep plane every single day, a trip that took a little over four minutes.  The main hoisting cables alone were made of 3 inch thick cast-steel that could pull 3 coal cars as once.  The Mahanoy Plane was so complex it required a team of over 60 men to work it.

Sadly, the Mahanoy Plane shut it engines in 1932, due to other easier routes built out of the valley.

The owners had the mighty steam engines dismantled, sold the long cables for scrap, and demolished the historic buildings in the 1950s – what a loss.  Eventually, Mother Nature overtook the full length of the Plane site with a forest of slender white birch trees. Today, the famous site is all but forgotten … except for a few loyal locals who refuse to let its memory die.  Currently, hikers can visit the heavily overgrown site at the north end of Frackville just beyond High Street.  You can inspect its thick, deep foundations, massive, three-story high stone trestles, and creepy underground rooms.

The Mahanoy Plane provided coal for the westward expansion of the United States, fueling railroads from the Mississippi to California.  Polish, Russian, Italian, German and Irish immigrants mined the coal that powered factories, steel mills and locomotives across the entire nation.  That same coal powered the steam ships that carried American soldiers across the Atlantic during World War I. For 50 years, this Plane, in a small Pennsylvania town, contained the largest steam engines in the world!

In 2007, the Pennsylvania Historical Commission installed a tiny Historical Marker along nearby highway 924, just outside of Frackville.  It gives a brief, 3 sentence description, stating at the end that ‘partial ruins remain nearby.‘  But that hardly seems sufficient for such a once legendary site.

Sadly, there are no Pennsylvania state plans to restore or even preserve the once famous site.  The forest has completely taken over and reclaimed the land.  To visit there in summertime, when the leaves are thick, you might trudge right past and miss the ruins it completely.  Only in the cold of winter, with the trees bare of leaves, is the site fully revealed to the curious, along with a spectacular view of the valley below. 

The once mighty Mahanoy Plane deserves far more remembrance than an overgrown plot of crumbling ruins and a forgotten place in American history.

For more by historical writer Paul Andrews, click BOOKS.