(HOST) Commentator Willem Lange recently participated in a Fall Foliage tradition - climbing Mt Washington on the Cog Railway. Turns out it made him just a wee bit nervous.

(LANGE) I know it's ridiculous, but I can't help worrying.  This operation must be approved by the National Transportation Safety Board.  So why am I imagining the worst as the locomotive pulls up Mount Washington with a shuddering rumble?

I'll tell you why.  Because I have a good imagination and a pessimistic attitude.  A little cog wheel is propelling over thirty tons of locomotive and passenger car up an impossibly steep grade of almost 40 degrees.  As I understand it, if that wheel jumps out of the ladder track, it's all over, because all the other wheels are - I hate to use the term at the moment - freewheeling.

The passenger car is full of leaf-peepers.  They seem uncertain whether to look out the window at the magnificent view of the mountains or wonder at the technology that's propelling them into the clouds above.  Tom, the brakeman, in a jovial shout, explains the braking system - omitting, I can't help but notice, the limited conditions under which it works.

The Victorian Era was an age of tremendous optimism, an industrial age powered by steam.  The first automobile up Mount Washington was a Stanley Steamer in 1899.  Steam wasn't efficient by current standards - it still takes a ton of coal and 1000 gallons of water to propel this locomotive and its car to the summit - but in its day it beat horses and oxen all to pieces.

Sylvester Marsh brought this optimism to the problem of climbing Mount Washington.  He'd made a tidy fortune as a meat packer and grain shipper.  Retiring to Boston at a fairly early age, he found inactivity was causing him health problems - what used to be called dyspepsia.

Then, in 1857, he and a friend were caught in a storm on Mount Washington and barely made it to the summit house.  The incident apparently inspired him to begin thinking of a railway to the summit.  He designed and built a working model and sought a charter from the State Legislature.  He was ridiculed as "Crazy Marsh."  But since he was spending his own money and planned to employ local labor, he got the charter.

What incredible effort it took to haul hundreds of tons of steel and machinery by ox cart the 25 miles from the nearest railroad station!  But Marsh and his men did it.  By August 1866 they'd finished enough track and trestle for a demonstration.  A hundred potential investors came to try it.  They were impressed, and the railway went on up the mountain.

Which it's been doing ever since.  The locomotives are geared extremely low; the pistons are doing a hundred, but the wheels roll at a walking pace.  Which gives me too much time to think as the sooty little locomotive with the canted boiler chugs to the summit one more time.  I'm nervous as a cat, and ready to jump overboard at the first hint of trouble.  I just hope it won't happen on the 30-foot-high trestle.  That'd be a long jump!

This is Willem Lange up on Mount Washington, and I wish I were back at work.