All Aboard

Arriving at Harveys Lake by Trolley.

People visiting Harveys Lake today generally enter the lake area from Idetown Hill. It is just about exactly a mile from the top of Idetown Hill to the stop sign on Lakeside Drive.  Before this road was built, there was (and still is) a road known, appropriately enough, as Old Lake Road.  It roughly parallelled the Idetown Hill, but it was narrow and had many winding curves. You can still approach the Lake on this road by splitting left at the ice cream stand and, a mile later, you will be at the bridge over the inlet next to Grotto Pizza (Home of the Legendary Taste).

But even back in the days of the Old Lake Road, many people arrived at the Lake by trolley car.  The line originated on Public Square in Wilkes-Barre, worked its way through Kingston to Luzerne, where it parallelled the highway (roughly) until it arrived in Dallas.  You can walk most of this on the Back Mountain Trail.  After leaving Dallas, the trolley wound its way around the hills until arriving at Idetown.  The thing about trolleys (and trains) is that they’re not so good at going up and down hills, so they have to follow the contours of the landscape. This just about doubled the last leg of the trip to Harveys Lake so the trolly could descend about 100 feet in altitude.  It did so by heading southwest from Idetown and running clockwise around a low marshy area, and then counter-clockwise around a rather steep hill just south of the Lake.

Most of the right-of-way still exists, though much of it is on private property.  You cannot, for example, get to the terminus of the trolley at the site of the old Oneonta Hotel – but you can get close.  If you’re really interested, see the map below.  The trolley rail bed terminates just to the right of the word “Shawanese” on the map, while the hotel was on the hill above the shoreline just below the “1255.”  The right-of-way itself is the dashed line that follows the contours around the marsh.

Following the contour lines from Idetown to Harveys Lake.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2012 at 10:31 pm. It is filed under Harveys Lake, PA, Northeastern Pennsylvania, Photography, Places, Seeing, Uncategorized, Woods and tagged with country, Harveys Lake, Nature, Photography, Seeing, woods. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.