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.
