PCMR is 1850 Feet Below Brighton… How Does That Impact the Mountain Accord’s Plan for Trains?

One thousand eight hundred fifty feet is over a third of a mile. It’s also the elevation difference between Brighton and the base of PCMR. After writing our last article about the time a cog rack train would take to get up Little Cottonwood Canyon, a concerned citizen enlightened us on a factor we had not included in our calculation. He felt our estimate of 15-20 minutes between Brighton and PCMR on the Mountain Accord train was way too conservative.

Using a maximum gradient of 5% for a Cog Rack train, he calculated that the path a train would have to take to get to PCMR from Brighton would be almost 8 miles. Given that a cog rack train would likely go about 10 miles an hour… that’s a 50 minute trip. So, if you are boarding a train at the entrance to Little Cottonwood Canyon, you are looking at almost a two hour trip to PCMR via rail.

So, who is going to do that?

h/t to A Good Friend of the Park Rag for pointing this out