Allegheny Portage Railroad National Historic Site

The Allegheny Portage Railroad was Pennsylvania's answer to the Erie Canal — the impossible piece of the Main Line of Public Works that carried canal boats over the mountain that stood between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. When the Erie opened in 1825 and Philadelphia's trade slipped away through New York, the legislature authorized a four-hundred-mile system of canals and railroads. The one problem was the Alleghenies. The solution was ten inclined planes — five up, five down — with stationary steam engines hauling the cars up a staircase in the mountains.

The engineering was audacious and it worked. Canal boats were floated onto rail cars — the later sectional boats split apart so the freight never left its hull — and the stationary engines pulled them up grades no locomotive of 1834 could climb. The thirty-six-mile portage cut the Philadelphia-to-Pittsburgh journey to four days. Charles Dickens rode it and wrote about the experience; enslaved people fleeing north rode it toward freedom; soldiers bound for the Mexican War rode it the other way.

The railroad lasted twenty years before the Pennsylvania Railroad's all-rail route made the planes obsolete — the inclines abandoned, the engines sold, the stone sleepers left in the mountain. The National Historic Site preserves the Lemon House tavern, the Engine House, and the Staple Bend Tunnel — the first railroad tunnel in America — on the grade where the boats went over the mountain.

Allegheny Portage is the archive's staircase file — the railroad that carried boats over a mountain on ten inclined planes, the twenty-year wonder that made the Main Line possible before the locomotives caught up.