A
cog railway or
rack and pinion railway is a
mountain railway with a special centre
rack rail[?] mounted in the middle of the
sleepers[?] between the regular
rails. The
trains are fitted with one or more
cog wheels that mesh into this rack rail (
picture (
http://www.pilatus.ch/images/zahnradbahn-stangen.jpg)). This then allows the
locomotives to haul the train up steeply inclined slopes.
Examples:
- Mount Washington in New Hampshire, built in 1869, the only railway in the world built entirely on a trestle (3.1 miles or 5.2 km long).
- Manitou and Pike's Peak Railway, Colorado Springs, Colorado, United States
- Jungfrau Joch[?], on the border of the cantons of Bern and Valais, Switzerland
- Schneebergbahn, Lower Austria, Austria
- The Nilgiri branch of the South Indian Railway, between Mettupalayam[?] and Conoor[?] in Tamil Nadu.
- Mount Pilatus near Lucerne - the world’s steepest, max. 48%.
See also: the Fell railway[?] system that uses friction wheels on a centre traction rail.
All Wikipedia text
is available under the
terms of the GNU Free Documentation License