The Mount Washington Cog Railway

Sylvester Marsh had already made and lost one fortune by the time he climbed Mount Washington in eighteen fifty-two and got caught in a sudden storm near the summit. He spent several hours sheltering in rocks above treeline while the wind tried to kill him. When he came down, he had an idea: a steam-powered railway, a cog mechanism fitted to a central rack rail, running up the steepest grades the mountain presented. He spent the next several years developing the engineering.

In eighteen fifty-eight, he petitioned the New Hampshire state legislature for permission to build it. According to accounts from the time, one legislator mocked the proposal by suggesting Marsh might as well apply for a charter to build a railway to the moon. The legislature gave him his permit anyway, perhaps not believing he could do it.

Marsh built it. The Mount Washington Cog Railway opened on July third, eighteen sixty-nine, the first mountain-climbing cog railway in the world. The steam locomotives pushed cars up a three-mile track, gaining roughly three thousand six hundred feet in elevation, on grades that in places reached thirty-seven percent. The summit, previously accessible only to the fit and the determined, suddenly had a different set of visitors: women in long dresses, elderly men who could not have hiked the carriage road, wealthy tourists who preferred not to, and people who were simply curious about what the weather observers at the summit hotel were experiencing up there.

The railway did not make the summit safe. The mountain's weather does not acknowledge infrastructure. But it changed the relationship between ordinary people and extreme terrain in a way that was genuinely new. The cog railway still operates today, now with biodiesel locomotives alongside the original steam engine. The rack rail it rides on is essentially the same mechanism Marsh designed in the eighteen fifties.