The Cog Railway: A Mattress Millionaire's Mountain Ride

In the summer of eighteen eighty-eight, a successful mattress manufacturer named Zalmon Simmons made the trip up Pikes Peak by mule. He found the view spectacular and the journey miserable. Two days on the back of a mule, picking through switchbacks with no shade and nowhere comfortable to sit, was not a reasonable price for a mountain panorama.

Simmons had built a business on the idea that comfort was a product worth selling. He decided to sell comfort at fourteen thousand feet. He incorporated the Manitou and Pikes Peak Railway Company in eighteen eighty-nine.

Construction began that same year, with Italian laborers working upward from the base station in Manitou using pickaxes and mule-drawn equipment. The engineering challenge was formidable. The line would climb eight point nine miles on grades as steep as twenty-five percent, a pitch that would simply cause a conventional locomotive to slip backward.

The solution was a rack-and-pinion system, specifically the Abt rack design, in which cogs on the bottom of the train's drive wheels mesh with a serrated center rail bolted between the running rails. The teeth interlock, and the train can neither slip up nor roll back. Limited service opened in eighteen ninety, and on June thirtieth of eighteen ninety-one, a church choir from Denver rode the first full passenger train to the summit.

The Pikes Peak Cog Railway became the highest cog railway in the world, a distinction it still holds. It is one of only three cog railways remaining in the United States. The railway underwent a complete rebuild and reopened in two thousand twenty-one after roughly three and a half years of closure, with new Swiss-built cars that complete the summit trip in about an hour.