Pikes Peak Cog Railway

In the late 1880s Zalmon Simmons, a Wisconsin manufacturer who later made his name with the Simmons mattress, rode a mule to the summit of Pikes Peak to inspect the insulators on a telegraph line his company had supplied. The trip took two miserable days, and he came down determined to put a railroad up the mountain. The Manitou and Pike's Peak Railway was chartered in 1888, and on June 30, 1891, the first train reached the top, on a center rack rail whose teeth the locomotive's cogwheels climb at grades up to twenty-five percent.

Katharine Lee Bates came up the mountain in the summer of 1893 by wagon and mule rather than train, and the view from the top gave her the lines that became America the Beautiful. In 1925 Simmons sold the railway to Spencer Penrose, who owned The Broadmoor hotel in Colorado Springs, and Swiss-built diesel railcars later replaced the steam locomotives.

By 2017 the line was worn out, and it closed that October with its future in doubt. The Broadmoor, after a tax-incentive agreement with Manitou Springs, spent about a hundred million dollars rebuilding it: new track on a different rack system, rebuilt older cars and three new trainsets from Stadler in Switzerland, one of the last makers of passenger cog trains. It reopened on May 20, 2021. Trains climb about nine miles from the depot on Ruxton Avenue to the summit visitor center at 14,115 feet, the highest railway in North America.