The Mount Washington Cog Railway Has Been Climbing New Hampshire’s Tallest Peak Since 1869

Sylvester Marsh asked the New Hampshire legislature for permission to build a railway up Mount Washington. They didn’t say no. They did something better. They granted the charter. Then they reportedly suggested he might as well extend the thing to the moon while he was at it.

Nobody thought it would work. A train cannot climb a mountain. That’s not a rule anyone made up to be difficult, it’s just how trains work. Steel wheels on steel rails slip on anything steeper than a gentle slope. A standard railroad considers a 3 percent grade steep. Marsh built it anyway. The average grade on his railway is around 25 percent.

He Nearly Died on the Mountain First

Marsh wasn’t a railway man. He was a Chicago meatpacking magnate who’d made a fortune inventing equipment for drying and processing meat. Not the résumé you’d expect here. Then, in the 1850s, he hiked Mount Washington and got caught in the weather. He nearly died up there.

Most people would take that as a lesson about staying home. Marsh took it as an engineering problem. He decided ordinary people deserved a safe way to reach the summit. Then he spent the next decade working out how. His solution was a cog system. A toothed wheel under the locomotive grips a notched rack rail running down the center of the track. So the train doesn’t rely on friction at all. It essentially climbs a ladder laid flat against the mountain.

Jacob’s Ladder

Construction started in May 1866. By July 3, 1869, the full three-mile line reached the summit at a cost of roughly $139,500. The nastiest section has a name. Jacob’s Ladder is a trestle where the grade hits about 37 percent. The train climbs a foot for every three feet forward. The original version stood nearly 30 feet above the rocks.

Sit in the car and you don’t fully register it. Stand up, and you’ll find yourself leaning forward with bent knees just to stay vertical. Builders angled the passenger car floors to compensate. So the whole thing looks subtly wrong when it’s parked on level ground. The 1938 New England hurricane tore Jacob’s Ladder apart. Crews rebuilt it longer and lower, and it’s been there ever since.

Ulysses S. Grant Took a Ride

The railway opened to genuine astonishment. People called it one of the great engineering achievements of the age. Early passengers included President Ulysses S. Grant. Marsh, for his part, made almost nothing from it. He’d poured his own fortune and years of his life into the project. The railway didn’t pay its first dividend until 1877.

He seemed fine with that. Marsh claimed the whole undertaking had cured his dyspepsia. That might be the most nineteenth-century sentence ever recorded about an infrastructure project.

The Devil’s Shingles

Here’s the part that genuinely worries me on their behalf. Workers needed to get down the mountain at the end of a shift, and riding the train took ages. So somebody invented a slide board. It was a plank roughly three feet long, fitted with hand brakes, that sat on the center rack rail. A worker would straddle it and let gravity handle the rest.

They called them Devil’s Shingles. A trip that took hours by train took minutes this way. Naturally, the workers started racing each other. Down a mountain. On a plank. At a 37 percent grade in places. Management eventually banned them, which was the correct call and also a small tragedy.

The Cog is still going, more than 150 years later. It was the first mountain-climbing cog railway in the world, and it’s one of the oldest still operating. Most of the fleet now runs on biodiesel locomotives the company designs and builds on site. Steam still makes appearances too. The round trip takes about three hours, including a stop at the top.