Category:Built by Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company

English: The Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company was an early mover-and-shaper of the Industrial Revolution in the United States. Cited by economists as the first modern corporate example employing vertical integration it became an economic powerhouse by the mid-1850s where raw materials were mined at one site, transported in company vehicles on company roads to company processing plants to issue as finished products delivered by company transport technologies. In the meantime, it transported goods, mining products for other mining concerns and even invested in and financed competing rail networks and mining companies, such as the Beaver Meadows Railroad & Coal Company (1830) and Lehigh Valley Railroad (1846) which both competed in part with the parent LC&N Company businesses.

What its founders and managers needed, it built, often figuring out how to make things work as the task was accomplished. Accordingly, it built foundries, smithies, wire and nail mills, the continent's first wire rope factory, and several of the first blast furnaces. Later it would import equipment and talent to establish 6 of the first eight successful furnaces producing in the needed industrial quantities the new anthracite pig iron using the new hot blast technology at its Lehigh Crane Iron Works in Catasauqua, Pennsylvania. The new Iron Works would bootstrap high volume production of high quality iron and jump steel and cast iron production and processing in the entire east including Allentown and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (and their growth into cities employing tens of thousands) — making everywhere, Eastern Pennsylvania the industrial powerhouse of the early American Industrial Revolution.

The LC&N Co. began with a need for fuel for the energy starved foundries of Philadelphia, which were importing expensive bituminous coal by oceanic vessels before 1812, while timber stands were far away and vanishing along the east coast of the 1790s. In response its founders combined two enterprises which had been failing, and built the initial works of the Lehigh Canal and infrastructure supporting regular production of anthracite and delivered hundreds of tons to the docks of Philadelphia four years before they'd promised.
As the industrial revolution progressed, by 1827 the company transformed the Lehigh Navigations into a two way canal system and it built the first operating US railway longer than 5 miles (8.0 km) which carried the first passengers three years ahead of any other North American railway but a few experimental test runs. This became the Summit Hill & Mauch Chunk Railroad, a coal road that became an immediate tourist attraction — later in the century after upgrades to became known as 'The Switchback' about 1850, and when transformed solely to be a tourist attraction when sold off it became legally the 'Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway' — for a further five decades long career continuing as an summer attraction second only to Niagara Falls until 1933.

When LC&N Co. divested itself of the Switchback, it also leased all of its extant railroads to the Central Railroad of New Jersey as a Pennsylvania subsidiary, staying away from railroads until financing the Lehigh and New England Railroad. While the general failure of Eastern US railways in the United States during the 1960s brought it to its financial knees, for over 118 years (1818-1977), it spun off subsidiary companies like the first successful producer of Anthracite pig iron, the Lehigh Crane Iron Works and through railroad subsidiaries managed by its (Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad subsidiary initially built and ran most the industrial Pennsylvania portions of the trackage later leased by the Central Railroad of New Jersey (CNJ) while quietly acquiring and exploiting key land blocks in at least five Northeastern Pennsylvania Counties, Luzerne, Schuylkill, Lehigh, Northampton, and most of all, Carbon County. Dissolved formally in 1984, most of the key Northeastern Pennsylvania trunk lines built by LC&N Co. actions or financial backing, continue on in operations today under Reading, Blue Mountain & Northern or Norfolk-Southern Railways.