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The Mount Washington Cog Railway is the world's first mountain-climbing cog railway. Locomotives employ a cog propulsion system (also known as a ratchet or rack-and pinion or Marsh rack system) rather than a wheel-driven means of pushing carriages up the mountain. The first ascent by passengers of the three-mile track on the west side of Mount Washington in New Hampshire, USA was by a wood-fired steam locomotive on Saturday, July 3, 1869. "The Cog" continues to operate as recreational passenger train in the summer season using one or two steam locomotives and four biodiesel-powered locomotives. The route begins at Marshfield Station at an elevation of approximately 2,700 feet (820 m) above sea level and ends at the summit of Mt. Washington at an elevation of 6,288 feet (1,917 m).

It is the second steepest rack railway in the world with an average grade of over 25% and a maximum grade of 37.41%. 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), although the diesel is capable of reaching the summit in less than 40 minutes. On a recreational excursion, the train travels approximately 65 minutes to ascend and 40 minutes to descend. It is the only mountain-climbing cog railway built on a wooden trestle. The passenger carriages are not mechanically connected to the locomotives but are held in place by gravity, resting above the engines on the ascent and descent.

Most of the Mount Washington Cog Railway is in the unincorporated townships of Thompson and Meserve's Purchase, with the section at Mt. Washington's summit being in Sargent's Purchase. The railway lies entirely within the White Mountain National Forest with the summit track and terminus residing in the 59-acre Mount Washington State Park. Renowned for its meteorological extremes – "The World's Worst Weather"  – the summit is home to the Mount Washington Observatory, a non-profit research and educational institution. The summit also hosts commercial broadcast installations, the terminus of the Mount Washington Auto Road, and the Sherman Adams summit complex, owned and managed by the state of New Hampshire's Division of Parks and Recreation. The NHDPR cites: "The Sherman Adams building, a modern summit building, houses The Sherman Adams Visitor Center, a cafeteria, restrooms, gift shops, the Mount Washington Observatory and its museum."

History
The railway was built by Sylvester Marsh (1803-1884) a native of Campton, New Hampshire, who made his fortune in Chicago in the years between 1833 and 1853. He was an inventor noted for devising steam-operated meat packing plants and machinery for drying grain. Upon his retirement in 1855 (and relocation to Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts), he held eleven US patents. By all accounts, Marsh was inspired to build the railroad after he and a clergyman friend, on a recreational hike in August 1857, were caught in a wintry gale as they followed Crawford Path toward the summit. They lost their way amid snow squalls as night fell and, only by luck, happened upon shelter at the summit. His biographer, Richard S. Joslin, wrote: "Marsh thereby had found his mission: to provide, as he wrote, 'some easier and safer method of ascension.'" According to Joslin, Marsh "explored several alternatives" -- including a cable-driven funicular railway which was proving successful at Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts. Needing a locomotive that could climb a steep incline, he experimented with toothed rack and cog systems. Heretofore, most cog engines had operated on straight horizontal tracks, with ratchets on two outside racks. Marsh devised a locomotive that featured a single ratchet gear and one central rack. It was an adaptation of a hybrid wheel-driven and central cog-driven locomotive briefly manufactured by Baldwin Locomotive Works. His final design used only the central cog and freed the weight-bearing wheels to travel the steeply inclined and curving track that is required to surmount Mount Washington's arduous terrain. Marsh was applied for a patent in 1858. It was granted in 1861.

In June 1858, two months after submitting a model to the Patent Office, Marsh presented a desk-top, wind-up version of his contraption to the New Hampshire Legislature (New Hampshire General Court). He was granted a five-year charter to build cog railways on Mount Washington and Mount Lafayette. Popular tradition insists that a proposed amendment to the charter would have granted Marsh permission to "let him build a railway to the moon." This species of ridicule paradoxically provided Marsh lavish publicity and "railway to the moon" has been an enduring sobriquet for the Cog.

The American Civil War and a Chicago real estate dispute (Marsh prevailed in the litigation after engaging Illinois attorney Abraham Lincoln in 1860 shortly before Lincoln became a candidate for President. ) distracted Marsh and delayed the Cog enterprise. But this interval serves to illustrate Marsh's continual efforts to improve the safety and efficiency of the proposed project. His initial published sketches of the project showed a gravel rail bed. Subsequently, Union Army engineers in the Civil war invented a timber truss bridge to speedily reestablish river crossings that had been destroyed. Marsh readily incorporated the new technology. He also improved brakes and boilers. In 1863, without having yet broken ground, he obtained an extension to his charter and published plans for his vertical boiler in Scientific American. From this wartime interregnum onward for forty years, Marsh assiduously devised dozens of improvements to the railway, notably, switches and brakes – most of which were not realized in his lifetime.

Making the Cog a commercial success was a challenge. Marsh moved to Littleton, NH in 1863 (his family followed in 1865) to supervise the construction of the excursion railway. Except for wooden members which were milled on site, all the components such as rails, spikes and the engine itself were hauled by oxen from the railroad terminus in Littleton, some 15 miles distant from the Cog base station. At the base station (dubbed Marshfield for the inventor and Darby Field, purportedly the first white man to ascend the mountain), on August 29, 1866, Marsh presented a demonstration of his train on a steep length of track. Having proven his invention, Marsh formed a corporation and invited investors to finance the completion of the project.

The subsequent development and management of the enterprise has been a subject of recurring dispute and conflicting accounts. Walter Aiken, a shareholder and manufacturer of several Cog locomotives, constructed a hotel at the summit, reputedly against the wishes of Marsh. The inventor was more absorbed in mechanical and engineering matters than catering to tourists.

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