Switchback

Switchback, a term applied to a zigzagging, alternate back and forward mode of progression up a slope. A 'switchback railway' originally meant one where the ascent is up a steep incline simplified by curving the track backwards and forwards (and upwards) on the face of the slope. Afterwards the term came to be applied to a railway where (as at Mauch Chunk, q.v.) the movement of the carriages is largely effected by their own weight alone, the descents by gravity and the ascents by a stationary engine. (This railway, once used for carrying coal, was superseded in this capacity by a tunnel, and subsequently reserved for pleasure excursions.) Hence the application to the well-known apparatus for amusing the public at watering-places, fairs, and exhibitions: a short length of elevated railway with a series of rounded inclines, so that the car gains enough of momentum descending the first steep incline to ascend one or more smaller inclines till it gradually and more slowly works its way to the original level at the far end of the course. Thence it returns in the same way. Sometimes these switchbacks are made circular. Very similar were the so-called Montagnes Russes, elevated wooden frames with (wheeled) cars rushing down and up the slopes again, designed to represent Russian snow-slides, which were introduced into Paris as a popular amusement about 1815. The 'Flying Mountains' of St Petersburg had been described by Lord Baltimore in his Gaudia Poetica (1770). Thomas Moore's Epicurean, published in 1827, and based on some knowledge of the Montagnes Russes, describes very nearly the modern switchback.