The 9-Mile American Cog Railway That Climbed a 14,000-Foot Mountain and Then Disappeared

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]Picture this.

[00:00:01]You are sitting in a modern diesel-electric train car climbing Pikes Peak in October 2025.

[00:00:09]You are at 12,000 ft elevation. Through the window on your right, you see fresh steel rails gleaming in the thin alpine sun. Through the window on your left, 50 ft away, you see another set of tracks, same gauge, same toothed cog rail running down the middle. But these are weathered silver-gray, rusted, and no train has run on them in 8 years. The wooden ties under those rails were placed there in 1891 by men who walked up this mountain on foot, who carried iron and timber on their backs past the tree line, who slept in canvas tents at 12,000 ft in November.

[00:00:52]Those rails have stood there for 134 years. Nobody is taking them down. The man who built them was named Zalmon G.

[00:01:01]Simmons.

[00:01:03]I want to tell you why they are still up there.

[00:01:07]Simmons was 60 years old in the summer of 1888.

[00:01:12]He was wealthy. He was the founder of the Simmons Bedding Company in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the same mattress company you have probably heard of.

[00:01:21]He was not a railroad man. He was not an engineer. He was a furniture manufacturer who had come to Manitou Springs, Colorado, for the mineral waters and the mountain air.

[00:01:33]On a July afternoon in 1888, Simmons paid a guide $2 to ride a mule from Manitou Springs to the summit of Pikes Peak.

[00:01:43]The trail climbed 7,500 vertical feet over 8 and 1/2 miles.

[00:01:49]It took him 2 days. By the time he reached the summit at 14,110 ft, he was sunburned, dehydrated, and furious.

[00:02:00]He looked east across 200 miles of plains stretching into Kansas, and he made himself a promise.

[00:02:08]No tourist was ever going to suffer that mule ride again.

[00:02:12]Simmons was going to build a railroad to the top of Pikes Peak.

[00:02:17]The engineers he hired that fall told him it was impossible. The problem was the grade. A normal steam locomotive in 1888 could climb maybe a 4% grade at full power.

[00:02:31]5% [music] was extreme.

[00:02:33]To reach the summit of Pikes Peak from Manitou Springs, the railroad would have to average a 16% [music] grade and hit a maximum of 25%.

[00:02:44]That is 1 ft of climb for every 4 ft of forward travel.

[00:02:49]A normal steel wheel on a normal steel rail cannot do that. The wheels would spin in place. The locomotive would slide backward. Every engineer in Colorado told Simmons the same thing.

[00:03:02]Build a road. Build a trail. You cannot build a railroad up Pikes Peak. If you want more stories about American places where the doors were locked and never opened again, subscribe to Sealed America. There is a new one every week.

[00:03:18]And what is still inside the next one [music] is even stranger than this.

[00:03:24]Simmons did not accept the answer. He went to his library and started reading European engineering journals.

[00:03:30]In one of them dated November 1987, he found an article about a railway in Switzerland called the Mount Pilatus Railway, which had opened that June.

[00:03:42]The Pilatus line climbed a 48% grade, almost twice what Pikes Peak required.

[00:03:49]It did this using a a called a rack and pinion, where a toothed iron strip ran down the center of the track, and a geared cogwheel underneath the locomotive engaged the teeth and pulled the train up the mountain like a zipper.

[00:04:03]The system had been refined by a Swiss engineer named Roman Abt, >> [music] >> who had invented a double rack design where two staggered cog rails meshed with two staggered cog wheels. So, at any moment, at least one tooth was always in contact. It could not slip.

[00:04:22]Simmons sent a telegram to Switzerland.

[00:04:25]He hired Roman Abt as a consulting engineer. He hired Major John Hulbert as chief engineer of construction. He chartered the Manitou and Pikes Peak Railway Company in 1889.

[00:04:38]Construction began that summer.

[00:04:41]Crews graded the route by hand. They blasted granite with black powder.

[00:04:47]They laid wooden ties cut from Colorado pine, and bolted the ABT rack rail down the center of the line, one section at a time, up an 8.9-mile route that climbed 7,539 vertical feet.

[00:05:03]They worked through the summer of 1889 and the summer of 1890.

[00:05:09]The winter of 1890 killed at least one of them.

[00:05:12]>> [music] >> An Italian immigrant who had come to Colorado for the work was caught in a snowslide above 10,000 feet in February.

[00:05:20]The crew dug him out the following day.

[00:05:23]He was buried in Manitou Springs. The records do not give his first name. They give a number. He came to Colorado for the work, and he never went home.

[00:05:34]Construction finished in the spring of 1891.

[00:05:39]The first train climbed to the summit on June 30th, 1891.

[00:05:43]The locomotive was a Vauclain compound steam engine built by the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia, designed specifically for cog operation.

[00:05:54]It pushed a single open passenger car up the mountain at 4 mph.

[00:05:59]The trip took an hour and 15 minutes.

[00:06:02]The ticket cost $5 round trip. That is about $170 in 2025 money.

[00:06:11]On opening day, the train was full.

[00:06:14]It stayed full for the next 126 years.

[00:06:18]>> [music] >> Think about that number for a minute.

[00:06:21]126 years of continuous summer operation.

[00:06:26]From 1891 to 2017, [music] the Manitou and Pikes Peak Cog Railway ran trains to the summit. It survived the panic of 1893.

[00:06:37]It survived two World Wars. It survived the Great Depression. [music] It survived the rise of the automobile, the paving of the Pikes Peak Highway in 1915, the Interstate System, the closure of half the passenger railways in America.

[00:06:52]By the time the last original train ran on October 31st, 2017, an estimated 8 million passengers had ridden to the summit on the same line Simmons opened in 1891.

[00:07:06]Four generations of American families.

[00:07:08]Grandfathers who first rode it as boys taking their own grandchildren up the mountain on the same wooden seats. It was the highest passenger railway in North America.

[00:07:18]It still is.

[00:07:20]If you want more stories about American places where the doors were locked and never opened again, subscribe to Sealed America.

[00:07:28]There is a new one every week, and what is still inside the next one is even stranger than this.

[00:07:35]In the summer of 2017, the Broadmoor Resort, which had owned the railway since 1925, announced the line was closing.

[00:07:45]The reasons given were track wear, rolling stock age, and the cost of compliance with modern Federal Railroad Administration safety standards.

[00:07:55]The original Abt rack rail strips, some of them still the iron Roman Abt had specified in 1888, had been re-bolted and reinforced over the decades, but the underlying alignment was old. The original Vauclain steam locomotives had been retired in 1938.

[00:08:14]Diesel-electric units replaced them in the late 1960s.

[00:08:18]The track itself was largely original.

[00:08:20]To bring the railway up to 2017 standards meant rebuilding it from the granite up. The last public trip on the original alignment ran on October 31st, 2017.

[00:08:33]The Broadmoor announced a $100 million renovation.

[00:08:38]The new line would have a slightly re-aligned route in the steeper upper sections, completely new track, new wooden ties, new Swiss-built diesel-electric trains designed for high-altitude cog operation, and new passenger stations.

[00:08:53]Construction took 4 years.

[00:08:56]The new railway reopened in May 2021.

[00:09:00]Here is the part almost nobody talks about.

[00:09:03]When the Broadmoor crews rebuilt the line between 2017 and 2021, they did not remove most of the original 1891 infrastructure. They built the new alignment alongside it, 50 to 100 ft away in most places.

[00:09:20]The original Abt rack rails, the wooden ties, the Alpine waiting stations, the small wooden trestles crossing the gulches above 10,000 ft, the iron mile markers, the granite anchor blocks Simmons' crews had drilled into the mountainside in 1889. [music] All of it was left in place.

[00:09:41]The official explanation in the public filings was straightforward.

[00:09:45]Dismantling the old infrastructure at altitudes above 12,000 ft with no road access would have cost more than the scrap value of the iron and timber.

[00:09:55]The labor was not worth the recovery.

[00:09:58]The decision was made to leave it. So, they left it.

[00:10:03]I have ridden the modern cog railway to the summit. I have looked out the left side of the train at 12,000 ft and seen the [music] parallel rails. I have stood at the Mountain View turnout and seen the abandoned 1891 cog rail strip still bolted to the wooden ties about 60 ft down the slope, the same iron that opened the line on June 30th, 1891.

[00:10:29]Still there, still bolted down, exactly where the last 1891 train left it on October 31st, 2017.

[00:10:39]The alpine air at 12,000 ft is cold and dry.

[00:10:43]There is almost no moisture, almost no biological decay, no rust accelerator.

[00:10:50]The wood does not rot. The iron weathers but does not corrode through.

[00:10:55]The 1891 line is preserved by the mountain itself.

[00:11:00]Most of you have seen Pikes Peak on a Colorado postcard.

[00:11:04]Some of you have driven the Pikes Peak Highway.

[00:11:06]A few of you have ridden the modern cog railway.

[00:11:10]Almost none of you knew that running parallel to the modern line 50 [music] ft over is the original wooden railway that Zalmon Simmons built in 1891 to keep a promise he made to himself on a mule ride.

[00:11:25]It is still in place, still bolted down, still climbing the mountain. Nobody stopped to look. Now you know it is up there.

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