Manitou and Pikes Peak Cog Railway

I spend last weekend in Colorado Springs, Colorado at a company event of my employer and since I had some spare time on Saturday afternoon, I drove over to Manitou Springs to take a quick peek at the Manitou and Pikes Peak Cog Railway, one of the two only cog railways in the United States (the other one of course is the Mount Washington Cog Railway - interesting choice of internet domain names by the way …). The United States does not have a whole lot of cog railways, so this was something rather unique and I had to go see it. I knew that they were using Swiss built diesel powered cog railcars - but I was still surprised to see how, well, “Swiss” everything looks. This could almost be the Mount Rigi railway or something like that … Switzerland does have the largest number of cog or rack railways in the world (see also here), so it does not come as too much of a surprise that they would use Swiss technology. In fact, other cog railways around the world do the same.

I didn’t have enough time to actually ride it, but maybe one more notable fact is that this train goes up higher in elevation by far than all the Swiss railways - the highest mountain station in Switzerland (actually, in all of Europe) is the Jungfraujoch station at 3454 meters above sea level - but the Pikes Peak station is located at an elevation of 4300 meters above sea level (14,110 feet), so it is a good 850 meters higher up in elevation!

Anyway, here are a couple of pictures, all taken at the base station in Ruxton/Manitou Springs, itself already 2002 meters above sea level …

Old steam engine, no longer in service.