The nation’s third electric railway was located in Easton, where regular passenger service began from this point on January 14th, 1888. The system eventually expanded across the Lehigh Valley and for roughly 65 years provided fast, inexpensive, and clean transportation throughout the region and to points beyond, until private automobiles, intercity highways, and buses replaced it and Easton saw its last trolley run on June 6th, 1953. Easton’s steep slopes posed a special problem for 19th-century railway designers because earlier cable technology could tow cars mechanically up and down hills by clamping onto a continuously moving underground cable, but such systems were costly to maintain and required steam plants. Electric motors lowered costs significantly, yet metal wheels on metal rails offered little traction, making steep hills hard to climb and dangerous to descend. To move trolleys on the steep incline between Downtown and College Hill, engineers used a balanced weight mechanism built from simple machines: an inclined plane, a pulley, and a wheel and axel. A short track between the summit and base carried a wheel sled loaded with pig iron, and this sled was connected to trolleys by an assist cable. A steave synchronized movement at both ends of the cable to account for the different track lengths, so that as a trolley ascended the hill the sled descended, and vice versa. After a trolley traveled the length of the system, the counterweight sled was fastened in place until a trolley traveled in the opposite direction. Unlike cable cars, the tow line did not power trolley movement but instead reduced a trolley’s effective load through gravity and basic physics, allowing the electric motor and brakes to do the rest. The Easton balanced weight mechanism was one of only two of its kind in the U.S. Trolleys became part of daily life in Easton for over half a century, contributing to commerce along their routes and Downtown and serving as a vital link between neighborhoods. Even with the balanced weight mechanism, steep hill travel could end in disaster, as on November 10th, 1891, when an assist cable broke loose from a car and caused a derailment. Because the mechanism had to alternate between uphill and downhill trips, trolley schedules were timed around it, and a side track allowed moving cars to pass others waiting for the counterweight to return.
