Cass Scenic Railroad, located in Cass WV, allows you to ride on a coal powered steam train up into the mountains.

Cass was a lumber town, and had a mill that ran until the 1950s, but had it’s heyday in the early 1900s, when the mountains (and most of the state, to be honest) was logged.

The Cass rail line uses/used Shay Engines which were designed to allow the engines to climb steep inclines with sharp turns hauling heavy loads of timber.

Here’s a close-up of geared wheels:

Here is the crankshaft:

And here’s everything put together:

Here’s the view from the opposite side:

Here’s the view from the inside.

That square box is there so kids and stand on it and see better.

Here’s a look back at some of the track we’ve just passed over. I was serious about the track being curvy.

Here’s a look forward at the engine, from where I was sitting on the train.

If you look closely, you’ll notice that the engine is “on backwards” actually pushing the train up the hill rather than pulling. The reason for this is because, as a coal engine, it throws lots of soot and cinders, and as we’re on a sight seeing tour, they want the cinders going behind the train rather than in front of it.

Of course, there are two switchbacks, so for part of the ride, we did get ash and cinder rained down on us, but luckily for us, our car had a top.

The guys leaning out at the ends of the cars are the break men (there was a break woman as well). Their job is to loosen or tighten the break on each car, and to do so in tandem with the other break men, so the cars don’t bump into one another. The break man on our car was a 70-year-old man who was also the narrator/guide for the trip. He was awesome, to be perfectly honest.

The break on the car in front of us:

And some more pictures of the train:

And, a completely random note, Cass supplied timber to the paper mill in Luke, Maryland–which is where my great-grandfather worked his entire life (except during WWII, when he was in the Navy). So the logging of the red spruce here help my great-grandfather employed.