The oldest mountain railway on earth is in New Hampshire, and you can still ride it today

It’s the world’s first, and it still runs

Mount Washington is the tallest peak in the Northeast, and for 155 years, there’s been a train going straight up the side of it. Not a cable car, not a gondola.

A real locomotive, pushing a single coach up nearly three miles of track through forest, clouds, and open tundra to a summit where the wind has hit 231 miles per hour. The ride takes about three hours round trip.

What happens along the way is harder to summarize.

One man’s near-death hike launched a railway

Sylvester Marsh was a New Hampshire native who nearly died on Mount Washington in a storm in 1857. He walked away from that hike with a plan: build something that could get anyone up the mountain safely.

When he brought the idea to the New Hampshire Legislature in 1858, lawmakers told him he might as well build a railway to the moon.

Marsh patented his cog mechanism in 1861, broke ground in 1866, and on July 3, 1869, the first train reached the summit.

The cog system that makes it all possible

The secret is in the name. A toothed gear wheel on the locomotive meshes with a ladder-like rack rail bolted between the two running rails, working the same way a bicycle chain grips a sprocket.

On a slope this steep, that grip is everything. The locomotive pushes a single passenger car up the mountain, then descends in reverse.

Multiple braking systems, including disc brakes and sprag clutches, keep things controlled on the way down. Nothing about this ride is accidental.

Climbing grades that would stop a car in its tracks

The average grade on this railway exceeds 25 percent, which means the train climbs more than 25 feet for every 100 feet of forward movement. For reference, U.S. highways max out at 6 percent.

The steepest section, Jacob’s Ladder, pitches at a 37.41 percent grade.

At that angle, passengers sitting at the front and back of the same coach are about 14 feet apart in elevation. Only one rack railway in the world is steeper, the Pilatus Railway in Switzerland.

Jacob’s Ladder: where the mountain gets serious

Jacob’s Ladder is roughly 300 feet of elevated wooden trestle, sitting about 25 feet above the rocky mountain surface at around 4,725 feet elevation.

It’s the steepest railroad trestle in the world, and it curves left as it spans a boulder-strewn gap. From the trestle, you can look across the ravine to the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Lakes of the Clouds hut.

The original trestle came down in the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 and had to be rebuilt from scratch.

Steam engines with slanted boilers still make the climb

The railway runs seven biodiesel locomotives day to day, each powered by a 600-horsepower John Deere marine engine and burning 18 to 22 gallons per round trip.

Every locomotive and coach gets designed, built, and maintained on site at the base station. But two coal-fired steam locomotives still run when conditions allow: MW2, built in 1875, and MW9, built in 1908.

Their boilers are mounted at an angle so the water line stays level on the grade. A single steam run burns a ton of coal and 1,000 gallons of water.

Watch the forest disappear one mile at a time

The train leaves Marshfield Base Station at about 2,700 feet, deep in northern hardwood forest.

As it climbs, the trees shift to spruce and fir, growing shorter and more bent by the wind with every hundred feet of elevation. Cross 5,000 feet and the forest stops.

What’s left is subarctic alpine tundra, the kind of landscape you’d find in far northern Canada. That full transition happens over just three miles of track, and you watch every step of it from your seat.

Five states and the Atlantic from the top

Mount Washington stands 6,288 feet above sea level.

On a clear day, you can see New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, and New York from the summit observation deck. The Atlantic Ocean is about 90 miles to the east.

Look north and you’re seeing southern Quebec. On certain days, neighboring peaks poke up through a sea of low-hanging clouds below the summit, a phenomenon called an undercast.

Hurricane-force gusts hit the top an average of 110 days per year, so the view you get depends on when you show up.

The summit recorded the world’s highest wind speed

On April 12, 1934, observers at the Mount Washington Observatory recorded a wind gust of 231 miles per hour.

That reading still stands as the highest wind speed ever directly measured at a staffed weather station, and it holds the Northern and Western Hemisphere records for surface wind.

The observatory has operated on the summit since 1932, running year-round through winters where temperatures drop to minus 47 degrees Fahrenheit and wind chills have reached minus 108.

The summit visitor center calls the mountain the Home of the World’s Worst Weather.

The summit itself is worth the whole trip

At the top, the Sherman Adams Visitor Center has a rooftop observation deck and an interactive weather exhibit that explains why this peak earns that title.

The Tip Top House, built in 1853, is one of the oldest mountaintop lodging structures in the world and now operates as a museum.

You can also drop a postcard in the summit post office, which stamps it with a Mount Washington postmark. Not many places give you that option at 6,288 feet.

Workers once rode wooden boards down the rack rail at 60 mph

In the railway’s early days, workers built homemade slideboards to ride the rack rail down the mountain after their shifts. Each board ran about 35 inches long and 10 inches wide, fitted with hand-forged iron brakes.

The average descent took 15 minutes, but faster runs were common. The record was 2 minutes and 45 seconds, which works out to better than 60 miles per hour.

The railway eventually banned the slideboards after a worker was killed, though some reportedly kept using them into the 1920s.

Presidents, engineers, and Swiss railways all took notice

President Ulysses S. Grant rode the Cog Railway in August 1869, just weeks after it opened.

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the American Society of Civil Engineers both recognize it as a National Historic Engineering Landmark, a designation it received in 1876.

The original locomotive, Old Peppersass, built in 1866, sits on display at the base station. Its vertical boiler reminded people of a pepper sauce bottle, which is how the name stuck.

The railway’s design directly inspired the Swiss to build the Vitznau-Rigi-Bahn on Mount Rigi, which opened in 1871.

The winter train goes halfway up and that’s enough

The railway runs year-round. From late October through early May, trains stop at Waumbek Station at roughly 4,000 feet instead of pushing to the summit.

You still get elevated observation decks, warming huts, a fire pit, and hot drinks included. The winter round trip runs about an hour with a 25-minute layover at the station.

Backcountry skiers and snowshoers use the winter train to get higher on the mountain. In a world where most mountain railways shut down when the snow comes, this one keeps the schedule.

Ride the Cog Railway in New Hampshire

You can find the Mount Washington Cog Railway at Marshfield Base Station on Base Station Road, about 6 miles east of Route 302 near Bretton Woods.

The base station sits at 2,700 feet and includes a free museum, gift shop, and food court. Old Peppersass and other vintage equipment are displayed around the property.

Summit trips run roughly May through late October. Winter Waumbek trips run November through early May.

Reservations are strongly recommended since trains regularly sell out, especially on weekends and in fall foliage season.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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