Marsh, Sylvester

SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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b. 30 September 1803 Campton, New Hampshire, USA

d. 30 December 1884 Concord, New Hampshire, USA

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American pioneer of mountain rack railways.

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Marsh, a businessman whose interests successively included packing pork and dealing in corn, was inspired by a rack railway built in 1847 up the 1 in 16.5 Jefferson incline, Indiana, to design and build a line to the 6,293 ft (1,918 m) summit of Mount Washington, New Hampshire. The gradient averaged 1 in 4 and Marsh installed a rack made from wrought iron with rungs fastened between upright bearers that were deep enough for the teeth of a locomotive's driving pinion to engage with two rungs at a time; counter-pressure brakes controlled a locomotive's descent. The Mount Washington Cog Railway was the first mountain rack railway: it opened in 1869 and even now continues to operate with steam locomotives.

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Bibliography

Marsh took out four US patents relating to rack railways between 1861 and 1870.

Further Reading

O.J.Morris, 1951, The Snowdon Mountain Railway, Shepperton: Ian Allan. P.B.Whitehouse, J.B.Snell and J.B.Hollingsworth, 1978, Steam for Pleasure, London: Routledge \& Kegan Paul.

J.R.Day and B.C.Wilson, 1957, Unusual Railways, F.Muller.

See also: Riggenbach, Niklaus

PJGR