There was no steam on the Mount Washington Cog Railway in Bretton Woods, NH, on the day I visited, so I contented myself with getting some shots of the first cog railway engine in the world.
The engine was built by Campbell & Whittier in Roxbury,
MA, as #1. Initially named "Hero", it was employed building the line up Mt Washington. In 1867, the engine was
renamed "Peppersass", apparently because its upright
boiler suggested a bottle of pepper sauce. Pronounced with
a New England accent, "sauce" became "sass", and the
name stuck. It was retired from active service in 1878 and at some point was sold to the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, who donated it to the State of New Hampshire in 1929.
Technically, with a 4’ 8” gauge, this is a narrow gauge locomotive (½” less than standard gauge). It weighs 16,000 lbs, has 15” drivers, 8” x 12” cylinders and, with the fuel and water bunker built on the chassis, making it an 0-2-2T type locomotive.
The three mile long Mount Washington Cog Railway opened to the public on 14th August 1868 and was the world's first mountain-climbing cog railway.
In 1931, Henry N. Teague bought the railway. After his death in 1951, Arthur S. Teague, the colonel's protégé but no relation, became general manager and, in 1961, gained ownership. After his death in 1967, ownership passed to his wife, Ellen Crawford Teague. In 1983, she sold the railway to a group of New Hampshire businessmen. Since 1986, it has been owned by Wayne Presby and Joel Bedor of Littleton, NH.
You can see another of these engines on the
Mount Washington Cog Railway #4 page of this website.
Construction reached the summit in July 1869. It uses a rack system developed by Sylvester Marsh where the pinion wheels on the locomotives have deep teeth that engage rollers arranged like the rungs of a ladder between two L-shaped wrought-iron rails. It is still the second steepest rack railway in the world, climbing 3,600 ft up Mt. Washington's western slope.
Sylvester Marsh died in 1884 and control of the railway passed to the Concord & Montreal Railroad, which ran it until 1889 when the Boston & Maine Railroad took over.
