In late summer of 1869, a man named Sylvester Marsh stood on the summit of Mount Washington in New Hampshire and watched a locomotive climb toward him up a slope so steep that the track disappeared beneath the front of the engine. The locomotive was called the Hero, and it weighed six tons. The grade it was climbing was 37 percent, steeper than most staircases. The locomotive did not slip because it did not depend on friction alone.

Beneath the engine, a toothed steel wheel meshed with a third rail of iron teeth set between the two main rails. The cog wheel drove the locomotive forward tooth by tooth, and gravity could not pull it back because the cog wheel held it fast. What Marsh had built was the first mountain cog railway in the world, and it had taken him eleven years and the labor of hundreds of men to reach this moment. Most people who know the Mount Washington Cog Railway know it as a tourist attraction, the oldest railway of its kind in the world, still running steam trains on the same route completed in 1869.

What most people do not know is the cost of building it. Not the engineering side, which was so innovative that it drew the attention of every railway publication in the United States, but the physical labor. The men who drove iron into granite on the flank of a mountain capable of generating a windstorm that could destroy a wooden building in twenty minutes. The men who built a wooden trestle on a 40 percent grade above the valley floor, a structure that creaked and swayed in winds that never stopped.

The men who were paid by the day to stand on scaffolding in conditions the mountain made clear, again and again, without apology, that it did not intend to tolerate. This is the story of the building of the Mount Washington Cog Railway, and this is what it cost the men who built it. Mount Washington rises 6,288 feet above sea level. That elevation is not exceptional by Western standards; the rim of the South Kaibab Trail in the Grand Canyon is higher.

What makes Mount Washington exceptional is not its height but its weather. The mountain sits at the junction of three major storm tracks in the northeastern United States. The jet stream passes directly over its summit in winter and approaches it at irregular angles throughout the year. Cold air from the north collides with moisture from the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico over this particular summit with a regularity that meteorologists have spent 150 years trying to fully explain.

The result is a peak that recorded the highest wind speed of any surface weather station in the world for most of the twentieth century. On April 12, 1934, a weather observer at the Mount Washington Observatory recorded a wind gust of 231 miles per hour. That record stood for seventy-six years. The summit rises above the tree line for its upper 1,200 feet.

The terrain above the trees is exposed granite, scattered boulders, and the remnants of a landscape carved by glaciers, with nothing to shelter a man from the wind. Snow can fall on the summit in any month of the year. Visibility drops to nothing within minutes when clouds move in from the west. In winter, the combination of wind and ice produces dense accumulations on structures that must be broken off by hand with tools to keep them from collapsing under their own weight.

Sylvester Marsh understood this better than most people in 1855, because the mountain nearly killed him that year. He was caught in a sudden storm while descending and survived by digging into a hollow in the rock and waiting out the weather. After that experience, he spent the following months thinking about a question that seemed to most who heard it absurd on its face: was it possible to build a railroad to the summit? The practical arguments against it were many and obvious.

The grade was far too steep for any conventional locomotive. The weather would destroy conventional infrastructure. The cost would be enormous, and the economic viability uncertain. When Marsh petitioned the New Hampshire legislature in 1858 for a charter to build the railroad, the committee that reviewed his proposal described the project as impractical, overly ambitious, and unnecessary.

One committee member reportedly told Marsh that he could apply for a charter to build a railroad to the moon. Marsh did not take this as discouragement or an insult. He took it as a starting point. The charter was granted in 1858.

Marsh spent the next eight years solving the engineering problem, raising capital, and assembling the right skills. The man who solved the mechanical problem at the heart of the project was Herrick Aiken, a mechanic from Franklin, New Hampshire, who designed the locomotive and the cog-and-rack system that made the project possible. The locomotive used a cog wheel driven by the engine’s pistons, engaging with a central rack of iron teeth set between the two conventional rails. On flat ground, a standard locomotive is held in place by friction between its steel wheels and the steel rails.

On a 40 percent grade, that friction is not enough. The rack system removed friction from the equation entirely. The gears engaged with the rack teeth, which in turn held the locomotive to the mountain regardless of grade. No one in the United States had designed such a system before.

Aiken’s theoretical approach drew on proposals for European mountain railways, none of which had been built at the scale and grade Marsh was proposing. Aiken built a prototype in a workshop in Franklin and tested it on a scale model before a single piece of track was laid on the mountain. The prototype worked. In 1866, construction began.

The men who built the cog railway were drawn from a labor force that, by 1866, was well established in New England. Irish immigrants who had arrived through Boston and Portland in the 1840s and 1850s, driven first by famine and then by the construction contracts made available by America’s growing rail network, formed the core of the workforce. They had built the Boston and Maine, graded the Boston and Albany, and done the heavy blasting and digging on dozens of New England railroads before they were asked to climb a mountain above the tree line, where gusts could knock a man flat and temperatures could drop thirty degrees in an hour. Wages on the cog railway were similar to those paid on other New England railroad construction in the late 1860s, ranging from $1.

25 to $1. 75 a day for ordinary labor, rising to $2. 50 for skilled work involving drilling or handling gunpowder. In today’s value, that is roughly $25 to $50 for a ten-hour day, in conditions matched by no other project in the region.

No other railroad in New England was being built above the tree line. No other worksite in New England was subject to weather that could shut down work for days on end without warning, that could bury the construction front under three feet of snow in May, that could generate ice accumulations overnight that locked drilling equipment to the rock face and required an hour of freeing before work could begin. The workers camped at the base of the mountain during the construction season. A base camp was established near what is now the lower station of the Cog Railway.

Work crews climbed each morning on foot or on the partially completed track as construction advanced upward. As the line climbed past the halfway point and the grades grew steeper, reaching the worksite each morning became an ordeal in itself. A man carrying his tools up a 40 percent grade at 1,500 meters in the face of winds averaging 35 miles per hour in the upper elevations, even on calm days, arrived at the work face exhausted. There was no shelter at the upper worksites in the first construction seasons.

Men worked in the open on the exposed granite flank of the mountain. They worked in the wind, in clouds that gathered suddenly without warning, reducing visibility to the length of an outstretched arm. They worked in rain that was often cold enough at elevations above 4,000 feet to turn to freezing rain mid-storm. The construction season, because of the mountain’s erratic weather, was limited to roughly five months, from late May to early October, and within those five months there were weeks when the summit was entirely inaccessible.

Marsh did not record how many men were injured during construction. The accident records that would have contained this information do not exist in any archive that has been found. What remains are payroll records, engineering correspondence, and a few newspaper reports from Concord and Boston papers that covered the project’s progress with a mixture of genuine curiosity and barely concealed skepticism. The papers noted the tracks reaching remarkable heights but did not note the cost of getting there.

The one section that caused the hardest work on the entire line was a stretch called Jacob’s Ladder. Jacob’s Ladder is the steepest section of the Cog Railway, a quarter mile of track near the summit climbing at a continuous grade of 37. 41 percent. That number is precise because it represents something specific: for every 100 horizontal feet of track, the line rises 37.

41 vertical feet. The angle of ascent is roughly 20. 5 degrees from horizontal. Imagine a staircase where the height of each step is nearly equal to its depth; that is Jacob’s Ladder.

The original construction of Jacob’s Ladder required a wooden trestle, a structure of arched timber beams built up from the mountain’s surface to carry the track at the correct grade over terrain too steep and irregular to grade directly. Timber trestle construction was common on mountain railroads. Building a wooden trestle on a 37 percent grade in weather that destroyed wooden structures within months, on a mountain where the construction crew could not bring heavy equipment to the site because the railroad was what that equipment was meant to carry, was not common. The men who built the Jacob’s Ladder trestle carried every piece of timber used in it to the site.

The lumber was hauled to the base of the mountain by wagons from the nearest mill town, then lifted by hand along the unfinished track, either by ropes on the steepest sections or on the shoulders of the construction crew. A structural timber eight feet long weighed between 40 and 80 pounds, depending on the wood and its moisture content. The original Jacob’s Ladder trestle contained hundreds of these members. Each one was cut, placed, and fastened by hand on a slope so steep that a man who lost his grip on a timber watched it slide fifty feet before catching on another part of the structure.

The name of the foreman who oversaw the building of the Jacob’s Ladder trestle does not appear regularly in the surviving records. The engineering correspondence from the period names Marsh, Aiken, and the surveyors. The foreman’s name appears in passing now and then, while the names of the crew members are almost never mentioned. What the records describe, in the dry accounting language of construction, is the volume of material moved and the time it took.

The Jacob’s Ladder trestle was completed in the 1868 construction season, the project’s third year. The accounting ledgers for that season show an intense, continuous push at the upper worksites. Material costs for timber and iron spikes were recorded precisely. Human costs were not recorded at all.

To understand the physical reality of building the Jacob’s Ladder trestle, one must understand the nature of the mountain in late summer. July and August were the most productive weeks of the construction season, when the weather allowed work on a more permanent basis. But the term “more stable” is relative on Mount Washington. The peak records measurable precipitation more than 200 days a year.

In July and August, fog or cloud covers the mountain on most days, and clear days are the exception. A crew working on the Jacob’s Ladder trestle in August was working at about 5,000 feet, on a 37 percent grade, in conditions that swung between safe and dangerous at a pace that could not be predicted on any set schedule. A morning might start clear and cold, with the summit visible above and the valley floor below. By ten o’clock, clouds might gather from the west, dropping visibility to twenty feet.

Wind could build from a steady 15 miles per hour to gusts over 50 miles per hour within an hour. Lightning on the exposed upper mountain was not a seasonal hazard but a daily one throughout the summer months. A man standing on a wooden trestle structure during a thunderstorm at 5,000 feet was not in a position to descend quickly. Access to the trestle was from below, up the unfinished track.

Descending meant climbing down the trestle itself, which was as much a controlled fall as a climb, given the 37 percent grade in wind and rain. The men solved this problem the way construction workers on mountain projects have always solved unavoidable hazards. They read the sky. The men who had spent the most time on the mountain developed a sense of weather that valley-town men could not match in their first season.

When a particular kind of cloud formed over the mountain’s western shoulder early in the morning, the experienced men recognized it. They worked faster. They moved their tools to positions from which they could be recovered quickly. And when the experienced man said it was time to come down, everyone came down, because the experienced man had been through the version of this story where someone did not come down in time.

That knowledge was not written down anywhere. It passed from the man who had it to the men working beside him, day after day, season after season, over the three years it took to build the railroad from base to summit. This was the same transfer of knowledge that happened on every dangerous construction project of that era, not from a manual, not from a training program, but from direct experience, from the trials of those who had made mistakes and survived them. The blasting work on the upper mountain presented a problem that did not exist on the lower slopes.

Below the tree line, workers could use the surrounding forest as a reference for wind speed and direction when assessing whether it was safe to blast. The sound of a burning fuse carried a reasonable distance, and the trees provided some protection while waiting for the shot. Above the tree line, there was no protection, and the wind made the sound of a burning fuse inaudible at twenty feet. The powder crews on the upper mountain used a visual system instead of an auditory one.

The fuse man positioned himself at a set distance from the drill hole and watched the fuse burn instead of listening to it. When the fuse reached a certain point, he moved, and the explosion followed. This procedure appears in no gunpowder manual from the 1860s, because those manuals were written for underground miners, where conditions were controlled enough to allow standardized procedures. The upper mountain was not like that.

It was in constant motion. The procedures that worked were the ones the men invented on site and passed among themselves as reliable because they had used them and they had worked. The powder crews on the cog railway project worked in teams of three: one man to drill, one to load, and a third to clear the area and count the explosions. In the windy conditions above the tree line, only one man was watching.

On a project paid by the day, an employer might consider a man standing watch unnecessary. The records do not indicate whether the powder crews were pressured to reduce their safety margin. They only indicate that the work was completed. Drilling on the upper sections was a different problem from drilling in a protected valley.

A two-man team on a granite ledge below the tree line could work in relative stillness. On the exposed upper mountain, the wind worked against them. It was not always violent, but it was present most of the time. A man holding a steel drill against a rock face at 5,000 feet was resisting a force that changed direction without notice.

The man swinging the hammer adjusted his aim to the wind, then adjusted it again when the wind changed. The drill had to stay straight through both adjustments. A deviation of a few degrees in the angle of the hole changed the fracture pattern of the blast. A changed fracture pattern meant extra rounds of drilling to correct the face before the track bed could be established.

Experienced drilling crews adapted. They worked in two-hour shifts, with the drill holder and the hammer man trading places regularly, because the physical strain of holding the drill against the vibrations of the hammer blows in the wind was different from the strain of swinging the hammer. A man who held the drill for four straight hours lost the fine control in his forearm muscles that kept the drill accurate. Two hours, then switch.

That was the rhythm. They had learned from experience on the mountain that two hours was the limit for precise control in the upper weather. No supervisor wrote this down as a rule. The men simply knew it, because it was how the work got done without the holes drifting.

The track reached the summit on July 3, 1869. Marsh organized an official opening excursion in August of that year. P. T.

Barnum, who attended the opening, was quoted as describing it as the second greatest show on earth. Barnum knew the importance of spectacle, and the cog railway was genuinely spectacular. There was nothing like it anywhere in the world before Marsh built it: a locomotive climbing a 40 percent grade through cloud to a summit where the wind could take your hat before you finished putting it on. The railroad carried its first passengers in its first full season in 1870.

By then, the men who built it had scattered, returning to the valley towns and the railroad construction contracts that continued to move across New England and westward. Some of them had spent all three construction seasons on the mountain. When they left, they carried with them that particular knowledge of what it felt like to drive a steel drill into granite at 5,000 feet, with the wind pressing against the backs of their necks, the valley floor so far below that farms looked like patches of cloth on the ground. That knowledge had no value in a labor market paid by the day, where no one asked what a man had done before.

The payroll records listed them as laborers when they arrived and stopped listing them when they left. The mountain kept no records at all. The wooden Jacob’s Ladder trestle was replaced in 1887 with a structure of steel and timber capable of carrying heavier locomotives. The replacement required a construction crew to dismantle the original trestle while the railroad continued operating, removing the timber from the structure from the top down while the track remained in service below it.

The men who did this work were not the same men who had built the original trestle. Nineteen years had passed. The men who built Jacob’s Ladder in 1868 were in their forties and fifties by 1887, and their names appear nowhere in the replacement construction records. The steel structure was itself gradually replaced over the following decades as the railroad upgraded its equipment and capacity.

The current Jacob’s Ladder structure is a steel trestle rebuilt to modern engineering standards, carrying diesel locomotives up the same 40 percent grade that the Irish laborers had carried timber up by hand in 1868. The weather records on the mountain kept accumulating. The 231-mile-per-hour wind gust was recorded in 1934, during a storm that would have shut down construction completely for at least three days. The mountain has seen many such storms, and it has never stopped producing them.

Sylvester Marsh died in 1884, after selling the railroad in 1876 to a group of investors who ran it as a commercial enterprise for the next century. He died in comfort in Concord, New Hampshire, having seen his project go from legislative mockery to one of the most prominent tourist attractions in the northeastern United States. The Concord Monitor described him in his obituary as a visionary entrepreneur and the father of mountain railroads in America. His name is carved on a memorial plaque at the main station.

There are no plaques for the construction crews. There is no memorial at Jacob’s Ladder for the men who carried timber up a 40 percent grade in August winds to build the wooden trestle that the current steel structure replaced. There is no memorial for the powder crew that invented, out of necessity and survival, a visual system for detonating charges in winds so strong the sound of a burning fuse could not be heard. The railroad is the memorial.

It has operated continuously, with interruptions only for major maintenance, since 1869, more than 150 years of operation on a line built by day laborers by hand on a mountain the New Hampshire legislature believed unreachable. That is what returns again and again when reading the construction records and engineering correspondence of this project. The engineering solution, the cog wheel, the rack rail, the toothed center rail, is what every railroad history book discusses, and it deserves the discussion. It was a genuine invention, built from American materials by American mechanics, solving a problem that European railway engineers had looked at theoretically without solving.

Herrick Aiken’s locomotive design was studied by railway engineers from Boston to London. The mechanism is elegant, but it did not fasten itself to the mountain. Someone drilled the anchor holes for the rack rail on a 40 percent grade in winds of fifty miles per hour. Someone carried the rack rail teeth up from the valley on a road that did not yet exist, because building the road was the work itself.

Someone stood on the Jacob’s Ladder trestle frame in August clouds and set the steel rail in place by sight and by touch. The cog wheel carried the locomotive up the mountain. The men fastened the cog wheel to the mountain first. If you ride the cog railway today, you will notice the train slow as it approaches Jacob’s Ladder.

The grade pushes the front of the locomotive up so steeply that passengers in the forward cars feel themselves leaning back in their seats. The conductor announces the grade, and passengers photograph the track disappearing beneath their feet. Below the rails, if you look closely at the granite outcroppings on either side of the trestle, you will find the drill marks where the construction crews set their anchors into the rock in 1868. They are shallow depressions in the granite, slightly different in color from the surrounding stone where weathering has worked on them over the decades.

They are the same diameter as the hand drills used in the 1860s. The men who drilled those marks were paid $1. 25 a day and were recorded in the payroll records as laborers. The mountain was above them, below them, and beside them, every day of the three seasons it took to build the railroad.

They knew the mountain the way a man knows something when he has tried to kill it again and again without success. Its summit is 6,288 feet. The wind today is 43 miles per hour, and the forecast calls for clouds by noon. The cog wheel still turns.

The trestle still stands. And the drill marks are still in the granite, the names of the men who made them recorded nowhere at all.