The railroad up the hill at Port Henry was the Lake Champlain and Moriah, earlier the Lake Champlain and Mineville, built and owned by Witherbee, Sherman Co., later Republic Steel.
The LC&M originally brough iron ore down the from several deep mines above Mineville, for a Witherbee, Sherman blast furnace at Port Henry. They crossed above the D&H and unloaded the ore from the concrete trestle into bins for the blast furnace. I never heard of ore being transferred to barges at Port Henry.
After the operation was bought by Republic Steel, they built a sintering plant at Mineville to concentrate the ore. The LC&M still kept their engine house at Port Henry, but they eliminated the bridge over the D&H and used a connection to the D&H Champlain Division to reach their own tracks. They operated out of Port Henry with an engine and caboose, and only moved ore from the mines to the sintering plant.
The D&H Port Henry yard engine served the sintering plant over the LC&M, and brough the sinter down the hill, as well as bringing coal and culm up the hill to the plant.
Repbulic Steel owned the blast furnace at Troy, served by the D&H, but the ore for Troy came mostly from Lyon Mountain. The sinter from Mineville mostly went to Cleveland, Ohio, to a much larger Republic steel mill.
Republic Steel shut down the operation at Lyon Mountain in 1967. They were shutting down Mineville when I was transferred from D&H Track Supervisor at Plattsburgh in 1968 to the Erie Lackawanna. There was, and probably still is, a large brick house on the north side of the former LC&M, facing south toward the former D&H station. That was the Port Henry office building of Witherbee, Sherman Co. The D&H siding at Port Henry, which ran around the west side of the yard south of the freight house, was named Sherman, almost certainly for the same Sherman as the iron company.
Any pucker factor for a D&H trainman on the Port Henry Yard Engine would have belonged to an extra man who wasn't used to looking straight down and seeing the ties hanging over the edge of a rock cut. They were up on timber blocking, and we kept everything in place with considerable effort. I never heard, nor would I believe unless I saw it, of a time when a D&H engineer nearly lost it on the LC&M. If it happened, either I or one of my prececessors (I knew them all, going back into the 1920's) would have had to pick up the pieces, because there was no such thing as regaining control on that hill. If you ever lost it, your were history.
In my time up there, the road into Mullen Brook (MP 121) was a summertime camp road, and it was tricky in the winter. I almost got stuck with my Hi-Rail truck at the foot of the hill on the lake side of the railroad one afternoon, and I had to load a couple of rerailing frogs into the back (heavy darn things) to get enough traction to get out.
I don't think the photo ops are really great within winter walking distance from Mullen Brook, because the railroad goes inland right there. Further south, you can walk along the foot of the railroad grade for a while, and look up, but for the rest of it you would have to be up on the track That is not a life-enhancing experience, and I recommend against it. The railroad curves to the east around the crossing, though, and you might get some good shots of a southbound train from the land side.
That's one of the places I can still picture clearly in my mind. On February 1, 1967, at 2:53 a.m., my first official day as Track Supervisor at Plattsburgh, RW-6 dumped 34 cars of newsprint, potatos, powdered feldspar and scrap copper into about 500 feet of railroad just south of that crossing. It took three days of wrecking with two steam cranes, with the temperature reaching 20 below each night, before we had a hole through at five mph. Fortunately for my railroad career, there was nothing wrong with the track. It was a speed job, and the double-tier loads of newsprint rolled over on the curve. We determined the time it happened from the time the dispatcher lost the CTC code line.
As for Willsboro Rocks, some of the more notable photos were taken from the top of Willsboro Tunnel looking north. That is a good hike in the summer, but you would probably need snow shoes to get in there now. Highland Road runs north from Willsboro along the lake, on the land side of the railroad, and it comes close to the railroad north of the tunnel between the two bridges. You're right - stay off those bridges. It's a long way to the end and an even longer way down.
