The Gravity Railroad: One of America's Firsts

Here began one of the earliest railroads in the Western Hemisphere. Built between eighteen twenty-eight and eighteen twenty-nine by the Delaware and Hudson Company, the Gravity Railroad was engineered to move coal from the mines of northeastern Pennsylvania down to the Delaware and Hudson Canal at Honesdale. Gravity did the work on the downhill runs; mules and horses pulled the cars back up.

The line eventually extended south and west to Archbald and then to Valley Junction near Olyphant, and it later carried passengers as well as coal. It operated for seventy years, shutting down at the beginning of eighteen ninety-nine. As one of the nation's first commercial railroads, it helped prove that rail could move bulk freight economically, laying groundwork for the transportation revolution that followed.