Travel in Time with Dan | Mount Washington, New Hampshire
⚠️ Author’s Note: The following is a fictional historical interview. Sylvester Marsh (1803–1884) was a real American inventor and entrepreneur who, after nearly dying in a storm on Mount Washington in the mid-1800s, became convinced that a mechanical railway to the summit was not only possible but necessary. When he petitioned the New Hampshire legislature for permission to build it, a senator famously told him he might as well apply for permission to build a railway to the moon. Marsh didn’t listen. In 1869, he completed the Mount Washington Cog Railway. This was the first mountain-climbing cog railway in the world using rack and pinion technology that locked the train to the track and made sliding backward impossible. The railway transformed a summit once considered uninhabitable into one of New England’s premier tourist destinations and helped launch an entire regional tourism industry. This imagined conversation takes place in the hours immediately following Marsh’s near-fatal experience on the mountain. The historical facts are real. The dialogue is creative fiction, inspired by his documented determination, his engineering vision, and the public ridicule he would soon face and ultimately outlast.
📍 Setting: The base of Mount Washington, New Hampshire — mid-1850s. Late afternoon, the light already fading toward a cold evening. A man in his fifties is sitting on a wooden bench outside a small outfitter’s shelter at the mountain’s base, a blanket around his shoulders that someone has clearly just placed there for him. His coat is still damp. His hands, wrapped around a tin cup, have not entirely stopped trembling. He is not a man who appears given to dramatics. His face is composed, and deliberate. It’s the face of someone who processes things inward before he speaks. But his eyes, fixed on the mountain above him, have the particular intensity of a man who has just made a decision that will define the rest of his life and knows it. He looks up as I approach, and there is nothing in his expression that suggests he wants sympathy. What he wants, clearly, is to talk about the mountain.
Dan: Mr. Marsh. I’m glad you’re alive. I have to ask you what happened up there?
Marsh: (Quietly, still looking at the mountain for a moment before turning)
The weather changed. That is what happened, and that is all that happened, and that is also very nearly everything. One hour the sky was manageable. The next, the wind came down off that summit like it had a personal grievance, and the temperature dropped faster than I have ever felt temperature drop in my life. I lost the trail. I lost visibility. I lost, for a period of time I would prefer not to estimate too precisely, my confidence that I was going to walk back down this mountain at all.
(A pause, looking at his hands)
I found shelter behind an outcropping and I stayed there until it passed. That is the whole of the survival story. It is not a heroic account. It is an account of a man holding very still and waiting and being fortunate.
Dan: Most men who walk off that mountain after an experience like that are thinking about how glad they are to be alive. You look like you’re thinking about something else entirely.
Marsh: (The faintest suggestion of a smile)
I am thinking about the problem. I have been thinking about it since the moment the weather broke and I could see the trail again. A man nearly dies on a mountain, and the sensible response is to think about the mountain differently. I find I cannot do it. What I keep thinking is not that was dangerous but that was unnecessary. There is a difference.
Dan: Say more about that.
Marsh: (Setting the tin cup down, the blanket still around his shoulders, leaning forward slightly)
This mountain is not going away. People are going to come here regardless of whether I tell them not to, regardless of whether the weather is unpredictable, regardless of whether men like me nearly freeze to death on its slopes. They are going to come because it is extraordinary. Because there is nothing else like it in the northeastern United States. Because standing at that summit, on the days when the weather permits it, is an experience that cannot be replicated anywhere else in this part of the world.
So the question is not should people come here. They will. The question is what exists to help them when the mountain decides to be what it is. Right now, the answer is nothing. Nothing except luck and stubbornness and a good outcropping of rock.
(Looking back up at the summit)
That seems like a solvable problem to me.
Dan: What kind of solution are you envisioning?
Marsh: (With the careful precision of a man who has already been turning this over for hours)
A railway. Some form of mechanical conveyance that can carry people from this base to that summit reliably, in conditions that would defeat a man on foot. Not a carriage road. The grade is too severe for that, and the weather too unpredictable for anything that depends entirely on a horse. A railway. Something built into the mountain itself, something that cannot be blown off course or lose the trail because it is the trail.
Dan: The grade of this mountain is the first thing anyone will tell you makes that impossible. The steepest sections are nearly one foot of rise for every three feet of forward travel. No railway locomotive stays on track at that angle. The train slides backward.
Marsh: (Nodding, entirely unsurprised by the objection, as though he has already had this argument with himself and won)
That is the engineering problem, yes. And it is a real one. I am not dismissing it. But I want to be precise about what kind of problem it is. It is not a problem of whether a thing can be done. It is a problem of what mechanism makes it possible. Those are not the same problem, and people who cannot tell the difference between them spend a great deal of time concluding that things are impossible when what they mean is that they have not yet found the mechanism.
The rack and pinion principle has existed for decades. A center rail, toothed like a cog, engaged by a matching gear on the locomotive. The gear locks into the rack. The train cannot slide backward because it is not resting on the rails by friction alone. It is engaged with the mountain. The steeper the grade, the more that engagement matters. This mountain’s grade is not the obstacle. It is, in a certain sense, the argument for the mechanism.
Dan: Have you worked out the engineering of this in any detail, or is this still the shape of an idea?
Marsh: (A quiet, dry look)
I have been on this mountain’s slopes and off them for several hours. The engineering is not yet detailed. (A beat) But the principle is sound. I am certain of the principle. The details are a matter of time and work, and I have both.
Dan: Let me ask you the question that everyone else is going to ask you when you bring this forward. The summit up there is considered essentially uninhabitable. The weather record up there is unlike anything else in this country. If you build this railway and people ride it to the top, what happens when the weather does what it did to you today, but with passengers on board?
Marsh: (Taking the question seriously, sitting with it for a genuine moment)
That is the right question, and I will not pretend it has a simple answer. What I will tell you is this: a railway that reaches the summit also creates the infrastructure for a permanent human presence at the summit. A shelter. Eventually an observatory. People who know that mountain’s weather intimately, who can read its signals, who can make decisions about when the railway runs and when it does not. The railway does not just carry passengers up. It carries the possibility of managing the summit in a way that is currently impossible because no one can get there reliably enough to manage anything.
The mountain is dangerous today partly because it is inaccessible. Accessibility and safety, properly designed, move together.
Dan: You’re going to face a great deal of resistance to this idea. Not gentle skepticism… genuine public ridicule. Are you prepared for that?
Marsh: (A long pause, looking at the mountain again)
I was on that summit today, or close enough to it that the difference is academic, and I was alone, and I was very cold, and for a period of time I genuinely did not know if I was going to survive. (A beat) And what I thought about, in that outcropping, was not what people would think of me. I thought about the problem. I thought about the rack and the pinion and the center rail and whether the grades were workable and what a permanent shelter at the summit would need to be built from to withstand that wind.
If I can think about the engineering while I am nearly freezing to death, I suspect I can manage it while someone is laughing at me in a warm room.
Dan: That is a remarkable thing to say.
Marsh: (Simply)
It is an honest thing to say. Ridicule requires an audience that cares about the ridicule. I find I am more interested in the problem than in what people think of my interest in it. That may be a character flaw. It has also, I think, been useful to me on more than one occasion.
Dan: What do you say to the person… and there will be someone, maybe many someones… who tells you that you would have better luck building a railway to the moon?
Marsh: (A beat, something wry and unhurried crossing his face)
I would say that the moon presents certain logistical challenges that Mount Washington does not. The grade, for instance, is less of a concern. (A pause) And I would say that the people making that argument have not been on this mountain. They are arguing from a distance, from a warm room, about a problem they have not stood inside of. That is their right. It is also, I think, a significant limitation on the quality of their judgment.
The senators who will tell me it cannot be done have not been in that outcropping. They have not felt that wind. They have not looked up at that summit and understood, in their bones, what it would mean to make it reachable. I have. And that difference matters more than their confidence in my failure.
Dan: Last question, Mr. Marsh. Let’s say that people will ride that railway someday, if you build it, and they look down at this base and try to understand what it took to make that possible. What do you want them to know?
Marsh: (Standing slowly, the blanket falling from his shoulders, looking one final time at the summit before turning back)
I want them to know that the mountain did not get easier. That is the thing people misunderstand about what I am proposing. The weather up there will be exactly as brutal a hundred years from now as it was this afternoon. The grade will be exactly as steep. The wind will set the same records. I am not trying to tame the mountain. I am not interested in taming it. I am interested in building something that makes it possible to meet the mountain honestly, on its own terms, without asking luck to do the work that engineering can do instead.
(Quietly)
And I want them to know that today, sitting in that outcropping with my hands going numb and the wind doing what it does, I was not frightened of the mountain. I was frustrated with the absence of a solution. Those are very different feelings, and the second one is, I think, more useful.
(He picks up the tin cup, looks at it, sets it down again)
They might tell me to build a railway to the moon. I intend to build one to that summit instead. The moon can wait.
I watched Sylvester Marsh walk back toward the mountain’s base as the last light faded behind the summit, his coat still damp, and his step entirely steady.
In 1869, the Mount Washington Cog Railway opened. It’s the first mountain-climbing cog railway in the world. The rack and pinion technology worked exactly as he described from that bench, the cog locked into the center rail, the train engaged with the mountain, nothing sliding backward. The summit that had nearly killed him became accessible. The Tip Top House went up. The observatory followed. The tourism industry that would define New England for generations took the railway as one of its founding moments.
The senators who laughed are not remembered. The railway is.
The leadership lesson is the one Marsh lived in that outcropping, in the cold, with his hands going numb: the difference between an impossible problem and an unsolved one is the mechanism. Don’t accept the conclusion that a thing cannot be done. Ask instead what mechanism makes it possible. Marsh didn’t argue with the grade of the mountain. He didn’t pretend the engineering was easy. He asked what principle, properly applied, would make the grade irrelevant. And then he went and applied it.
231 miles per hour. The worst weather in the world. A summit once considered uninhabitable.
And a railway, locked into the mountain by a cog, carrying passengers to the top since 1869.
The moon, as far as anyone knows, is still waiting. 🚂⛰️
Travel in Time with Dan is where travel, history, and leadership come together. Uncovering History. Inspiring Leadership.
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