Pikes Peak Cog Railway

Few railways anywhere climb as hard as this one. From a depot in Manitou Springs at roughly 1,930 metres, the line runs about 14 kilometres up the flank of Pikes Peak to a summit terminus at 4,302 metres (14,115 feet). The average gradient is around 12 percent and the steepest pitches reach 25 percent, far beyond what ordinary wheels on rails can grip, so the trains haul themselves up on a toothed rack laid between the running rails. The operator calls it the highest cog railway in the world, and it is one of only three cog railways still running in the United States.

The idea came from Zalmon G. Simmons, the bedding manufacturer, who rode a mule to the top in 1888 while surveying telegraph routes and came back convinced that the mountain needed a gentler way up. Construction began in 1889, largely by Italian labourers working with picks and pack animals; limited service ran to the Halfway House in 1890 and the first train reached the summit on 30 June 1891. The original Baldwin steam engines were built with their boilers tilted to stay level on the grade, and they pushed rather than pulled the wooden coaches, so a broken coupling would not send a car rolling downhill. Shortly before the Great Depression, Spencer Penrose, owner of The Broadmoor hotel in Colorado Springs, bought into the line; diesels followed from 1939 and Swiss-built railcars from 1964.

What you ride today is largely new. Between 2019 and 2021 the track was torn up and rebuilt with steel ties and a heavier Strub rack, and three push-pull trainsets from Stadler Rail in Switzerland were delivered, along with a rebuilt fleet of older Swiss railcars. Trains returned to the mountain in May 2021, and at the top it now meets a new summit visitor complex. The scenery changes by the minute: the ride climbs out of Manitou through forest, passes bristlecone pines that the operator estimates at over two thousand years old, and breaks out above the tree line into open alpine country.

The view from the summit has its own history. In the summer of 1893 the poet Katharine Lee Bates reached the top of Pikes Peak, and the panorama of plains and ranges she saw there inspired the verses that became "America the Beautiful". On a clear day the plains fall away to the east almost without end, while to the west the peaks of the Front Range and beyond crowd the horizon. The air at 4,300 metres is thin, and the round trip, including time at the top, takes about three and a half hours.

Getting there

The depot is at 515 Ruxton Avenue in Manitou Springs, a small spa town at the foot of the mountain, about 10 km west of central Colorado Springs. The nearest airport is Colorado Springs Airport (COS), about 21 km away.