Built in 1850, the inclined planes were 1,200 feet long and 430 feet high, and as a loaded car descended on one plane, it would draw an empty car up the other. At Penn Haven, three railroads—the Hazleton, the Penn Haven and White Haven, and the Beaver Meadow—converged at a busy railroad intersection where tons of anthracite coal came down from the surrounding mountains and were transferred to boats on the Lehigh Canal for shipment downriver to factories and cities. To move coal cars up and down the mountains, the railroads used cables attached to steam engines to pull the cars along the slopes of the inclined planes. The original hemp rope cables often broke and sometimes caused spectacular wrecks, but wire rope eventually replaced hemp and reduced destruction of equipment and injury and death among crew members. Only a few foundations remain from this important junction, the crowded railroad station, and the bustling little town that once stood here.