“Some of the peaks are 2,500 feet in height. The range is wild and rugged, and nowhere else in the State of Pennsylvania is the scenery grander or more diversified.
“Scaling its summits, spanning its chasms, and threading its dense forests, are two of the most novel railroads in the world.
“These are the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company’s Gravity Road and the Gravity Road of the Pennsylvania Coal Company.
“The roads are operated by an ingenious system of inclined planes, up and down the mountain, there being no locomotive smoke nor cinders to annoy the tourists.
“The delightful character of a ride over these gravity roads cannot be conveyed by words. There is nothing like it in this country. The Pennsylvania Coal Company’s road climbs from Dunmore, Pa., to a height of 2,100 feet in a distance of five miles.
“The road extends to Hawley, a distance of 33 miles, and then by another route back to Dunmore, one mile from Scranton.
“The Delaware and Hudson’s gravity road extends from Honesdale to Carbondale, seventeen miles, and back by another route.
“The highest point on this road is 2,000 feet, and from the car windows the Catskill mountains may be seen, sixty miles away.
“Lakes, waterfalls, glens, and valleys make these two excursions by gravity unrivalled.
“The Erie Railway Company has made every arrangement to introduce these roads to the public this season…Trains on these gravity roads connect with Erie Express trains to and from New York.
“Holders of other excursions, passing Lackawaxen at any portion of the route, can take in the Erie Switchback at a trifling additional expense, by means of the Side Trip Extension Excursions T, W, Y, and Z.”
—Summer Excursion Routes, 1881, p. 14.
For some more information on Pennsylvania’s Gravity Roads in 1881, see the post from 2011: A Railroad in the Clouds
