Sylvester Marsh

Sylvester Marsh ( born September 30, 1803 in Compton, New Hampshire, USA, † December 30, 1884 in Concord ) was an American inventor and railway engineer.

Life and work

Marsh grew up as the ninth of eleven children in rural New Hampshire. At the age of 19 he went on foot to Boston, Massachusetts, where he worked in the trade of food and feed as well as in the flesh trade and built up his own business in the market hall. In 1827 he went to Ohio and settled in Ashtabula on Lake Erie. In later years he moved to the present-day Midwestern United States and was successful with the trade and export of cereals and especially of corn. At the same time, he invented various methods to dry corn by the use of steam engines, thereby render them more suitable for the transport and secured patents for its corresponding methods and machines.

Marsh was a rich man mid-1850s back to New England, where he devoted himself to the development of tourism of his home by railway and construction of hotels and other infrastructure

Marsh designed with the help of engineers studied the first cog railway in the world, in which mastered on a third located in the center of the rail tracks a steam locomotive as the drive with its payload by means of a gear a slope. For this invention, on August 12, 1863, he received a U.S. patent.

In the same year, work began on a cog railway on Mount Washington in New Hampshire. In 1866 there were over a distance of 500 meters, the first attempts instead. The first paying guests toured the not quite finished stretch of the Mount Washington Cog Railway on 14 August 1868. March 7, 1869, the first mountain railway with gear drive in the world has been taken over the entire length into operation.

Technical data of the railway line

The Mount Washington Cog Railway, which is still in operation today, overcomes, to a length of 4.8 kilometers, an altitude difference of 1,097 meters. The slope is 25% on average, on the line of greatest slope, however, 37.41 %. The track width of the cable car is 4 '8 '', which are 1.422 mm. Today is the first train of the day is only powered by a steam engine, the normal operation is performed since 2009 by diesel-powered locomotives.