Ashley Planes was a historic freight cable railroad situated along three separately powered inclined plane sections located between Ashley, Pennsylvania at the foot, and via the Solomon cutting the yard in Mountain Top over 1,000 feet (300 m) above and initially built between 1837 and 1838 by Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company's subsidiary Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad (L&S).

One result of the 1837 updates of omnibus transportation bills called the Main Line of Public Works (1824), the legislation was undertaken with an eye to enhance and better connect eastern settlement's business interests with newer mid-western territories rapidly undergoing population explosions in the Pre–Civil War era.

But those manufactories needed a source of heat, and Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania was barely connected to eastern markets except by pack mule, or only through long and arduous routes down the Susquehanna River then over land to Philadelphia.

It was designed during the mid-canal era as part of an overall strategic schema to lift heavy freight eastwards out of the Susquehanna Valley in suburban Wilkes-Barre into the eastside descents, which gravity aided to the canal head and thence using cheap practical water transport ended feeding much needed coal into all the big coastal cities of the Eastern United States accessible via the Delaware Valley, and to transoceanic destinations.

The Mountain Top to White Haven route also sent Northern Coal Region anthracite down the newly extended Lehigh Canal.

When using funicular action, as it did sending returns down during its early years the rails split connecting two pairs of tracks bulging out in a vase-like shape in a passing area, so the railway could ship freight downhill east to west as well as the heavy operations west to east which predominated until its closing.