Vulcan Iron Works produced mine and industrial locomotives, mine hoists, and other colliery machinery. Vulcan's locomotives were designed for mine, logging, plantation, and factory work, including steam, electric, and battery models for underground haulage. A large number were sold to strip mine and earthmoving contractors.

Richard Jones (1816-1847) founded the Vulcan Iron Works in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1849 to produce specialty iron products for the local anthracite coal industry. The company was incorporated in 1867. By 1881 its facilities included a machine shop, foundry, blacksmith/boiler shop, and pattern store and office, all located near the Lehigh Valley Railroad, the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad, and the Pennsylvania Canal. In addition to general machine work, the company made mining machinery, castings, and forgings. Branch shops were built in West Pittston and Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, and in 1888 Vulcan acquired the Wyoming Valley Manufacturing Company, makers of locomotives. This soon became a major part of Vulcan's activities, with the company making all types and sizes of locomotives for domestic and foreign industries. The company did a modest export business to Canada, Latin America, Russia, and East Asia.

Vulcan's other product lines consisted primarily of material movement and processing machinery: hoisting engines, shaft cages, bucket elevators, crushers, picking tables, and jigs for separating slate from coal, as well as mine fans. Most were sold to coal mining firms in the Appalachian coalfields and to remote operations of firms like Bethlehem Steel that were headquartered in Pennsylvania. It also sold grinding mills and rotary kilns to the Portland cement industry that grew up on the southeastern border of the anthracite fields and some sugarcane processing machinery in Louisiana and Cuba.

World War I led to further expansion, and in 1919 Vulcan built a steel plant with open-hearth furnaces to supply their needs. By 1929, the company employed about 1,600 people, manufacturing locomotives (both gasoline and diesel-electric) and electric hoists for mines. The collapse of the anthracite industry in the 1930s destroyed a large part of the company's market, and heavy trucks gradually replaced locomotives in stripping and construction haulage. Locomotive production ended with builder number 4877 in May 1949. Machinery production continued into the mid-1950s.