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Circa 1900. "Otis Elevating Railway, looking up toward Mountain House Hotel, Catskill Mountains, New York." 8x10 inch dry plate glass negative. View full size.
If you look hard enough you might see the camera way down at the other end of the tracks.
Barely visible to the left of the tracks at the top of the hill was the Catskill Mountain House, which operated from 1823 to 1941. The State of New York retroactively declared the land it occupied as "forever wild", and torched it in 1963.
The Otis Elevating Railroad only ran from 1892 to 1918. It's a wonder those square timber breaking braking rails didn't cause it to go up in flames before its commercial demise, but they were primarily for emergency use as this was the usual (almost) counterbalanced funicular.
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