The Pikes Peak Cog Railway
Near Manitou Springs, Colorado
From a depot here in Manitou Springs, a train climbs straight up the side of Pikes Peak on a toothed rail, gripping the mountain with a gear so it will not slide back down. This is the Pikes Peak Cog Railway, and it is billed as the highest cog railway in the world. The idea belonged to Zalmon Simmons, the mattress magnate behind Simmons Bedding.
In eighteen eighty-eight Simmons rode a mule to the summit of Pikes Peak, decided the view was awesome and the journey was awful, and set out to make the mountain reachable by rail. Construction began in eighteen eighty-nine, the work done largely by Italian laborers using pickaxes and assisted by donkeys, blasting and grading a bed up impossibly steep grades. Because of spring snows near the top, the very first passengers, a church choir from Denver, did not reach the summit until the thirtieth of June, eighteen ninety-one.
From the base in Manitou at roughly six thousand three hundred feet, the line climbs nearly nine miles to the summit at fourteen thousand one hundred fifteen feet. It has been carrying passengers up America's most famous mountain, the peak that inspired the song America the Beautiful, for well over a century.
