![]() (Arthur Teague was the colonel's protégé, but no relation.) After he died in 1967, the ownership passed to his wife, Ellen Crawford Teague, who ran the Cog as the world's first woman president of a railway. Teague became general manager, then gained ownership in 1961. Ĭontrol by the Teagues began in 1931 when Col. In 1910, the railway converted to using coal for all its locomotives. From 1868 to 1910, the locomotives were fired with wood. Sylvester Marsh died in 1884 and control of the Cog passed to the Concord & Montreal Railroad, which ran it until 1889 when the Boston & Maine Railroad took over. During his tour he rode the cog railway to the top of Mount Washington. Grant visited New England to escape the heat of summer in Washington, D.C. Later designs introduced horizontal boilers, slanted so that they remain close to horizontal on the steeply graded track. The early locomotives - represented today by the restored display locomotive, #1 Old Peppersass – all had vertical boilers, like many stationary steam engines of the time the boilers were mounted to the locomotives' frames with twin trunnions, allowing them to pivot as the locomotive and coach climbed the grade, permitting gravity to always keep the boiler vertically oriented, no matter what the gradient of the track. ĭespite the railroad's incomplete state, the first paying customers started riding on August 14, 1868, and the construction reached the summit in July 1869. The route closely followed a mountain trail that had been established earlier in the century by Ethan Allen Crawford. He developed a prototype locomotive and a short demonstration section of track, then found investors, forming the Mount Washington Railway Company in the spring of 1866, and started construction. Marsh obtained a charter for the road on June 25, 1858, but the American Civil War prevented any action until 1866. The railway is sometimes called "Railway to the Moon", because one state legislator remarked during the proceedings that Marsh should be given a charter, not merely up Mount Washington, but also to the moon. He was putting up $5,000 of his own money, and that, plus whatever else he could raise, would be spent locally, including building the Fabyan House hotel at nearby Fabyan Station to accommodate the expected tourists. ![]() Local tradition says that the state legislature voted permission based on a consensus that harm resulting from operating it was no issue – since the design was attempting the impossible – but benefits were guaranteed. Marsh came up with the idea while climbing the mountain in 1852. The railway was built by Sylvester Marsh who grew up in Campton. Share of the Mount Washington Railway Company, issued June 13, 1895 Most of the Mount Washington Cog Railway is in Thompson and Meserve's Purchase, with the part of the railway nearest to Mount Washington's summit being in Sargent's Purchase. Steam locomotives take approximately 65 minutes to ascend and 40 minutes to descend, while the biodiesel engines can go up in as little as 36 minutes. The train ascends the mountain at 2.8 miles per hour (4.5 km/h) and descends at 4.6 mph (7.4 km/h). The railway is approximately 3 miles (5 km) long and ascends Mount Washington's western slope, beginning at an elevation of approximately 2,700 feet (820 m) above sea level and ending just short of the mountain's summit peak of 6,288 feet (1,917 m). It is the second steepest rack railway in the world after the Pilatus Railway in Switzerland, with an average grade of over 25% and a maximum grade of 37%. Its track is built to a 4 ft 8 in ( 1,422 mm) gauge, which is technically a narrow gauge, as it is 1⁄ 2 inch (13 mm) less than a 4 ft 8 + 1⁄ 2 in ( 1,435 mm) standard gauge. It uses a Marsh rack system and both steam and biodiesel-powered locomotives to carry tourists to the top of the mountain. The railway climbs Mount Washington in New Hampshire, United States. The Mount Washington Cog Railway, also known as the Cog, is the world's first mountain-climbing cog railway (rack-and-pinion railway).
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