In 1869, New Hampshire opened a cog railway where normal trains could not climb; more than 150 years later, its toothed track still reaches Mount Washington’s 6,288-foot summit

In 1858, a New Hampshire businessman named Sylvester Marsh entered the New Hampshire legislature. He requested permission to lay track on the side of the tallest mountain in the northeast United States. According to ASCE, the lawmakers found it so absurd that, legend has it, they half-teasingly granted permission to extend the line all the way to the moon. On July 3, 1869, after building a grand railroad bridge, twelve years and one Civil War later, Marsh's train arrived at the 6,288-foot peak of Mount Washington.

It is still in operation today after 157 years, and is, to this day, the second-steepest rack railway on Earth and the first mountain-climbing cog railway ever built. It definitely sounds like a story that deserves more attention. This is a tale easy to overlook in an age of van-life reels and "hidden gem" listicles, amid the assumption that anything invented before smartphones couldn't have been that special. It was.

The moon joke that became a real train


Sylvester Marsh nearly died while hiking Mount Washington, and concluded that the mountain needed a train. The ASCE report says that the working prototype of the toothed cog mechanism that made the whole thing possible was built by inventor Walter Aiken, who then let Marsh do the rest. The genius lay not in the locomotive itself but in a toothed center rail called a "cog" which the engine's gear-wheel engages with to enable the train to ascend (and descend) on slopes which would otherwise pull the locomotive backwards down the hill.

And the grades here are not subtle. But the infamous section known as Jacob's Ladder has a 37.4 percent grade, steep enough for front-to-back passengers in a car to be approximately 14 feet higher when on this section. That makes it the second-steepest rack railway in the world, behind only Switzerland's Pilatus Railway, which climbs at a maximum 48 percent grade, and Mount Washington's Cog has held its own record for that gradient since before the advent of the telephone.

Built to survive the worst weather on the planet

The interesting part about this "tourist train" is that it was designed to make it to the top of arguably the wildest mountain in North America. A world record for the highest speed of surface winds was registered on April 12, 1934, at the Mount Washington Observatory when the speed of winds reached 231 miles per hour. The record remained unbeaten until 1996 and still represents one of the greatest achievements of the Mount Washington Observatory. This is the challenging environment in which this nineteenth-century train has been slowly making its way in and out of, day after day, year after year, for more than one and a half centuries.

Not everything about it has stayed the same. A round trip is still priced at over $100 per person, and, as its own operator puts it, "to safely get folks of all ages and abilities up there.” The railway has also largely replaced its coal-fired steam locomotives with biodiesel models: a sensible move for the environment, to be sure, but also a reminder that even a 19th century engineering masterpiece has its modern compromises between heritage and sustainability.

The value of persevering

Despite the cost, there's something rare about the Cog Railway: it's one of the very few places in the country where you can ride a track and cog mechanism that are still the same 1869 engineering that carried Marsh's first train up the mountain, not an interpretation of it in a museum, not a replica, even if today's cars run on biodiesel rather than coal. This is the real and somewhat frightening, still-functioning “historic” experience, in a time when most of the things are “historic” reenactments. That's why, when they say that a good idea sounds out of this world, remember that New Hampshire's legislature once thought this was a joke about the moon. It became 157 years of one of the highest engineering accomplishments in American history.