The Cog Railway Up Mount Washington

On the western slope of Mount Washington, a train has been climbing straight up the mountain since the third of July, eighteen sixty-nine. This is the Mount Washington Cog Railway, the first mountain-climbing cog railway in the world. Instead of relying on ordinary wheels on rails, a cog railway uses a toothed gear that grips a notched rack running down the center of the track, so the train can haul itself up grades no normal locomotive could manage.

It was the dream of an inventor named Sylvester Marsh, who applied to the New Hampshire legislature for a charter in the late eighteen fifties. Lawmakers thought the idea was so absurd that one of them mockingly proposed granting Marsh the right to build a railway to the moon while they were at it. Marsh developed his cog mechanism and, after the Civil War delayed construction, pushed the line to completion.

Its most famous stretch is called Jacob's Ladder, a trestle carrying the track up a grade of roughly thirty-seven percent, one of the steepest railway grades anywhere. Marsh's first purpose-built engine, nicknamed Old Peppersass, had a vertical boiler mounted so it would stay upright as the locomotive tilted skyward. The base station sits at about two thousand seven hundred feet, and the line runs some three miles to the summit.

Today the railway pulls passengers with modern biodiesel locomotives and still fires up a pair of coal-burning steam engines in season.