Jim Thorpe, PA

Why this stop matters

For most of its history this was Mauch Chunk, the anthracite port that Josiah White's Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company built where its mine railroad met the Lehigh Canal. That railroad — a gravity line opened in 1827 to bring coal nine miles down from the Summit Hill mines — was among the first built in the country, and after the coal traffic moved to newer routes it survived as the Mauch Chunk Switchback, a gravity-powered thrill ride whose runaway-car ratchet is reckoned an ancestor of the roller coaster.

Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk merged and renamed themselves Jim Thorpe in 1954, for the Olympian entombed there. The rails through the Lehigh gorge belong now to the Reading & Northern, the line 4014 travels on across eastern Pennsylvania.