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Mine Scenery / The Arch and the Lofty Tunnelsfp2/2/2004 |
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| A view of "The Arch", as we called it, which supported the tracks of the Mahanoy Branch of the Lehigh Valley Railroad on its transit from Quakake Junction to Black Creek Junction near Weatherly. This picture was taken in July, 2003 from the now blocked, very old Tamaqua to Berwick Turnpike at the foot of "The Mile Hill" near Ginthers, PA. The turnpike, now visible as a field of chest-high goldenrod and assorted wildflowers, once had an incarnation as PA Rte. 29, a predecessor of today's Mile Hill's Rte. 309. | The Arch also provided passage to Quakake Valley for the nascent Schuylkill River, here visible at the right side of the photo. A freezing cold freshwater stream merges with an equally cold sulfur creek a few hundred feet ahead of the tunnel (reverse direction from the viewpoint). The freshwater stream, highest and farthest reach of the elementary Schuylkill, descends through Lofty, PA from the north face of Delano Mountain about three miles away. The sulfur creek flows out of the mine wastes around the old Silverbrook mines near McAdoo one and one half miles north of this spot. |
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The old turnpike ran along the left side of the tunnel. As late as the 1960s one could drive a car all the way through. Obviously, floods have wrecked the old roadbed. For whatever odd reason, the railway approaches to the roadbed over this tunnel were dynamited in the 1960s. |
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| The "Switchback pinnacle" adjacent to the Arch. So called because here near the top of this rise the Lehigh Valley Railroad ran its winding descent from the coalfields on Spring Mountain to Quakake Valley . Hardly visible now on this picture, the double track line supported heavy, daily train traffic in the heyday of anthracite coal. | |
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| The south portal of the Lofty Tunnel. Lofty, PA, first called "Lindnersville" and then "Summit Station" is about two miles upstream on the little Schuylkill from the "Arch" locale described in the othe pictures on this page. The earliest railroad line to pass through here was the Catawissa Railroad. Built and completed in the 1850s, the Catawissa railroad was a difficult and renowned feat of the early American railroading industry in those days. Later on the railroad was merged with the Philadelphia and Reading Raiload empire. |
South portal of the Lofty Tunnel, March, 2003. This photo, shot from a viewpoint very near that of the picture at left, shows typical undrained snow melt and spring fed puddles. The earlier picture at left probably predates this one by 75 to 100 years. Interstate 81 has passed directly overhead out of sight here since the late 1960s. See much more here ... and here ... about this area and local coalfield railroading. |
