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The Lehigh & New England Trail is a 2.7 mile crushed stone and dirt path on the old Lehigh & New England Railroad grade just south of Tamaqua in Schuylkill County. It runs from the borough's southern edge on Route 309 to a small trailhead lot off Dairy Road in South Tamaqua, following the Little Schuylkill River and crossing Owl Creek on the way. A band of trees screens the highway for most of the distance, and the grade is rail flat, so it makes an easy out and back from town. Halfway along, the stone remains of the Shellhamer Ice Dam sit beside the trail with an interpretive sign.
Lehigh & New England Trail
Your comfort. Prognosticated.
-Cory
In a typical year the Lehigh & New England Trail has about 117 to 162 days of excellent weather for popular activities such as hiking, dog walking, e-biking, birding, running, biking, and walking, with May, September, and October the best months.
Hourly comfort scores for the next 15 days of weather, tuned to your activity and your own thresholds.
Plan your visit to this trail. Get the best windows for a comfortable outing.
Enjoy the Lehigh & New England Trail!
In half of past years, color along the Lehigh & New England Trail peaks October 18 to 27, typically around October 22. The trail has 51% deciduous coverage, with the majority being chestnut oak, red maple, northern red oak, and white oak.
The Lehigh & New England Railroad shut itself down on October 31, 1961 while it was still turning a profit. The Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company built the Panther Creek Railroad in 1849, six miles from its Lansford mines to the Philadelphia and Reading line at Tamaqua. By 1871 the company had decided to get out of running trains and leased its lines to the Central Railroad of New Jersey. The Lehigh & New England, chartered in 1873 as the South Mountain & Boston and renamed in 1895, was the coal company's own road east. In 1913 it took over what was left of the Panther Creek Railroad and folded it into a main line that reached Maybrook, New York. Anthracite was about half of what it hauled, cement most of the rest. The grade south of Tamaqua toward South Tamaqua is part of that line out of town. By 1960 the road was running one coal train a week, and the board chose to stop rather than wait for the losses. The Central Railroad of New Jersey bought the pieces it wanted, including the main line east from Tamaqua, and ran them as the Lehigh & New England Railway until the mid 1970s. The Tamaqua Area Community Partnership later turned the grade south of the borough into a crushed stone trail to Dairy Road, with interpretive signs at the trailhead and at the Shellhamer Ice Dam.
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