Steepest Mainline Rail Grades?

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fuzzybear63

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Has anyone ever come across a list of the steepest mainline railroad grades in America? A good list would help me plan a new project.
Thx
 
I know of a tourist railroad with the steepest standard gauge grades in the US! The Black Hills Central Railroad in Hill City, South Dakota.
 
The steepest standard gauge mainline is the United States was Saluda Grade. I'm not sure what state it was in. I want to say South Carolina. I'm probably wrong though. It was closed in the past few years. I believe it was 4.73%.

Steve
 
Well , how about the following Places:

Raton Pass
Cajon Pass
Tecapachi Loop

and btw , theres also an extremely steep rr called the MT. Washington Cog Railway and the grade is on average 25% and the steepest is 37.5%
 
The US Class 1 mainlines normally never go more than 2%, anything above that and extra help is tacked into the train in various places.

Cass Scenic Railway and other logging/NG RR's go up much steeper paths sometimes up to 11%
 
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A correction *Saluda is in North Carolina*

here is some info i pulled a site...
Grade11.jpg


What is the Saluda Grade? Saluda Grade is the length of Norfolk & Southern mainline rail between Saluda, North Carolina and Melrose, N.C. The total length of the track between these two points is 3 miles. The vertical distance however, is 600+ feet. The steepest portion of the grade is 5.03% That makes Saluda the steepest grade on a mainline track in the United States. When the grade was in operation, there were between twenty to thirty coal trains using it each month. Each train averaged one hundred cars. Each coal car weighed around 135 tons. So, each train carried about 1,300 tons of coal. That means the grade carried close to 32,500 TONS of coal a month. That is 390,000 tons of coal a year.
 
surely not the steepest but what about NS's mainline from Altoona PA to Cresson Pa? Track rises 91 feet per mile on that mainline.. Or how about the Boston and Albany Mainline from Hunnington to Pittsfield MA. The west side of the mountain has a grade of that almost 2%. another one I thought of just now is the line that runs to Upper Hudson. Its only 3 miles or so but at its southern end of the line its roughly a 3% grade-Nothing but Feed cars on that line though.

Happy Trainzin':wave:
Mike S.
 
Actually, The Madison Incline is the steepest 'mainline' grade in the US, at just under 6%, it's steeper than Saluda and Raton pass.

madisonhillSOUTHBW61607_jpg_41087.jpg


Saluda is pretty steep though.
 
The grade around horseshoe curve is 1.8 percent...the whole point of the curve was to get the grade down from over 2 percent.

I don't have the Sherman Hill grade offhand, but I would doubt it was more than 2.2 percent since that was the max the feds would pay for when the line was built. (If I remember my history, 2.2 percent just happened to be the ruling grade the B&O built during its first crossing of the appalachian divide and it became a kind of de facto standard, written into contracts and such.)
 
I hope we are not counting rack railways, in which case the Mount Washington Cog Railway would win :p

But seriously, some of the steepest grades were from the logging railroads. As GP_38-2 said, the Cass Railroad Branch (formerly Mower Lumber Company) contained grades near 11% or more near the switchbacks.

The reason they could negotiate these grades were simply because of the locomotives used. Geared locomotives, such as Shays, Climaxes, and Heislers were slow buy effective, and push out a lot of tractive effort (generated by the gear ratio for the driving wheels).

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
John
 
A correction *Saluda is in North Carolina*

What is the Saluda Grade? Saluda Grade is the length of Norfolk & Southern mainline rail between Saluda, North Carolina and Melrose, N.C. The total length of the track between these two points is 3 miles. The vertical distance however, is 600+ feet. The steepest portion of the grade is 5.03% That makes Saluda the steepest grade on a mainline track in the United States. When the grade was in operation, there were between twenty to thirty coal trains using it each month. Each train averaged one hundred cars. Each coal car weighed around 135 tons. So, each train carried about 1,300 tons of coal. That means the grade carried close to 32,500 TONS of coal a month. That is 390,000 tons of coal a year.

and their math is WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY off.

Each train had 100 cars, each car weighed about 135 tons gross. each car would have contained about 110 ton of coal. It doesn't take an idiot to work out that 100 x 110t does not equal 1,300 ton of coal per train. more closer to 11000 tons of coal. 30 trains a month... 11000 x 30 is 330,000 tons a month. 330,000 x 12 = 3,960,000 tons of coal a year.

regards

Harry
 
Dont forget sherman hill on the UP, 4% if I remember corectly...


UP fan, I couldent stop myself.

.. I thought Sherman was 2% (still try pulling 3000+ Ton trains up that in 1940s) until they opened a new line that had an easier gradient ..


From The Encyclopedia of Trains and Locomotives:

"Although they could and did operate on any part of the system, the operating requirements of the 'Big Boys' were defined by the UP's mountainous Sherman Hill main line through the Wasatch Mountains between Ogden, Utah and Green River, Wyoming, a 283km stretch rising from 589m to 2442m with a rulling grade of 1.14 per cent."
 
Hi everybody

Just to confirm post #3, according to the Guinness Book of Rail Facts and Feats (1975) "The steepest mainline gradient in the USA is the Saluda Hill on the Southern Railway, 34 miles (54.718 km) south of Ashville, North Carolina. The grade is 4.7 per cent (1 in 21.4)

"The steepest standard-gauge incline in the USA was on the north side of the Ohio River at Madison, Indiana on the Madison & Lafayette Railroad, opened on 1 April 1839. It was 7040 ft (2.146 km) and rose 431 ft (131.369 m) on a grade of about 1 in 17 (5.89 per cent).

"From 1866 it formed part of the Jeffersonville, Madison & Indianapolis Railroad, whose master mechanic Reuben Wells designed a massive 0-10-0 tank engine, built in 1868, to work the incline. The engine can still be seen today (or at least it could in 1975) in the Children's Museum, Indianapolis."

However, we British can go a bit better than 1 in 17. "The steepest adhesion-worked incline in Great Britain was the 1 in 14 (7 per cent) Hopton Incline on the Cromford & High Peak Railway in Derbyshire, opened in 1831 and closed in 1967."

"The steepest gradient over which standard-gauge passenger trains were worked in Great Britain was the Chequerbent Incline on the Kenyon-Leigh-Bolton branch of the London & North Western Railway in Lancashire. Mining subsidence had affected the incline making a short stretch 1 in 19.5 (5 per cent). 'Officially' the gradient was 1 in 33! At this place on end of a coach was 3 ft, or nearly 1 metre, higher than the other end."

Thanks for the interesting reading, everyone. Keep them coming.

Cheers

TD
 
CNR/CPR

Slightly off-thread, but I am staying in Cedarburg, WI, and there is a track through the town that gets about one (long) freight train a day. Maps show it variously as Canadian National or Canadian Pacific. What, 007007, is a Canadian railway doing in Wisconsin?
 
I was in Asheville about 2 weeks ago. If I had known that the Saluda trackage was there I would have visited.

Cheers,
John
 
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