And so, that night, she celebrated the centenial of this remarkable old system. Mount Washington is no ordinary mountain. It's the highest mountain in the northeast quadrant of America. The other is the worst weather on earth. The wind has reached 231 mph on Mount Washington.
Weather can change, in a blink, from calm, warm, and sunny to a winter blizzard.
By 1869, when the cog railway went in, three men and one woman had already died on the mountain. The center of the track is a long rack of gear teeth. A gear on the locomotive engages those teeth to drive the train upward. Ellen Teague ran the railroad from 1967 to 1984. Then it passed to Joel Bedor, who now keeps this remarkable tradition intact after a century.