Other factions pointed out by the early 1830s that the long channel across Pennsylvania's great valley would be expensive and that given the experience building the Allegheny Portage Railroad, a similar work could be constructed along with Navigations through the Lehigh River Gorge. By that time, the city fathers of Baltimore were directly trying to compete for the trans-Allegheny trade by incorporation of the ambitious goals of Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to surmount to the Monongahela and Ohio valleys via the Cumberland Narrows mountain pass, despite the early lack of power and speed in the untried railroad technologies. Moreover, LC&N had constructed the locally sensationalized 18 mile loop of Mauch Chunk & Summit Hill Railway (1827), the nation's second railway and one of its first tourist attractions, said to be the inspiration for the roller coaster—in which role it lived on in tourist trade until the 1930s, when it was sold to Japan for scrap. By 1837 a proposal extending the Pennsylvania Canal was passed enabling legislation for the LC&N to spearhead a similar gravity railroad from Penobscot to White Haven, whilst extending the Navigations on the Lehigh up through the Gorge and constructing a shortline railroad, the Lehigh and Susquehanna from wharves across Wilkes-Barre between its suburbs Pittston to Ashley, climbing the Mount Penobscot on the Ashley Planes Inclined Plane Railroad .