CHAPTER SEVEN

Echo Mountain


Premier to the Echo Mountain Promontory was the Echo Mountain House finished in November of 1894. This grand Victorian 70-room hotel, perched 3,000 feet above the valley equaled the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego. It featured three wings, a north and an east which were the main quartering wings, and a center wing, the dining room, which reached back towards Castle Canyon and Echo Canyon, for which the mountain takes its name. Its stairway lead directly up from the Incline landing. Added to the chalet and the pavilion, this makes the third in a series of hotels along the line.
Above photo is a rare shot of the Echo Mountain House lobby under construction. The fireplace stands to the left; north wing portal and concierge's desk behind that. The dining room is center to the rear, and the Grand Staircase is to the right rear, right next to the east wing portal. And the registrar's desk is far right.
Astronomer, Prof. Swift, sits by the fireplace in this photo of the finished lobby. Furnishings and carpets are in place, as well as the dining room tables in the rear.

The east wing of the Echo Mountain House is seen here as its end extends toward the Echo Mountain Chalet. Recognizable in this photo are Prof. Lowe to the far left, George Wharton James, his publicist, seated to Lowe's left and Prof. Swift, the Mount Lowe astronomer standing to the right of the pillar.

The dining room wing extends toward the back of the House to a large convex bay window which overlooks Castle Canyon from whose echoes the mountain takes its name. The "sweet spot," as it is called, over the canyons edge can return a bellowing voice as many as nine times. Megaphones were put up to assist in the bellowing.

Electrical systems were paramount to the operation of the Mount Lowe Railway and since Altadena had no real municipal power grids installed, Lowe had to produce all of his own electricity. The initial power plant was an undersized, underpowered gas engine driven generator that was hardly enough to get the trolley car rolling, much less optimumly operate an incline cable motor some three mile up line --- but never both at the same time!

Much of what Lowe eventually developed was water driven. The picture to the left shows a Pelton Water Wheel, one of the most popular devices used in the production of hydroelectric power. Lowe had at least three hydroelectric driven generators on a floor beneath the Rubio Pavilion.

A large reservoir was built on Mt. Echo that provided barely adequate water power for smaller units, but the Pelton required much more delivery, up to 100 hp., for heavier generation. Lowe built a rock dam just above Great Chasm Falls in Rubio Canyon creating a reservoir called Mirror Lake to which he connected an 8" pipeline that could adequately drive the Pelton Water Wheel. The only problem with this system was the seasonable availability of water. Therefore the whole line was integrated with other sources of power which had to be switched in, out, on or off depending on the usage.1

A detailed description of the electro-mechanical operations has recently been published in a book, MOUNT LOWE POWER published by Mt. Lowe enthusiast, John Harrigan, to which you will be introduced in a later chapter.

Particular to the system of the Great Incline was the large cable bullwheel (seen right) which was installed in the Incline Powerhouse 2 on Mount Echo. It had 72 clamping finger mechanisms that gently but firmly gripped the cable with virtually no friction thereby minimizing wear on the inch-and-five-eighths cable.

The bullwheel and its driving mechanism was all located in the basement of the powerhouse. To the left see the large 500-volt DC motor (A), the overspeed governor assembly which is really a speed-ball limiter switch (B), the main brake band (C), the intermediate drive gear 3 (D) and the bullwheel with an emergency brake band (E). 4

LEFT

RIGHT

From a vantage point up the line from the Echo Mountain House, pan right looking back at the House with its center wing (A) and side-by kitchen area (B). The Incline Powerhouse (C) is across the track and we are on the side opposite the Incline. In the foreground see the roof of the zoo (D), actually a menagerie in which Lowe collected various species of local fauna. The railed area (E) is a pen with a young Brown Bear in it.

Pan left and reorient yourself looking across the zoo (C). A two-story, wood-frame workshop and dormitory (A) towers over an add-on power station 5 (B) which is built of stone. The white dome (D) is the observatory which we will visit in an upcoming chapter.

Another look further yet up the line shows a one-story car barn, or service bay, which had an open service pit on a siding. This narrow gauge section of track is completely separate from any other section of the line, so all cars up here had to be serviced up here. Beyond the barn is the workshop/dormitory.

The gray square section of the photograph is enlarged to the right showing a gas storage facility. Prof. Lowe was piping hydrogen gas from Pasadena some eight miles away up the hillside and storing it in this container which in other photos shows an expandable bladder in various stages of repletion.

Above see the Mount Echo display in a photo shot from up the ridge looking down on the valley. Left to right they are the Chalet (A), the Echo Mountain House (B), the Incline Powerhouse (C), and in the foreground the Observatory (D).

Echo Mountain, with all its buildings painted white earned the nickname White City. Even at night with it's lights aglow, Echo was a city of white. It even had little white cars on its incline, which were once painted red, to match the trolleys. People down the hill who were used to seeing the little cars rolling up and down the Echo Mountain grade thought that the attraction had closed since they couldn't see them. They immediately repainted the cars their original white.

1. These particulars on the electrical and mechanical aspects of the Mount Lowe Railway are derived from the book " Mt. Lowe Power" by John Harrigan (April 2000). This and several other publications are shown and described in Chapter 20.

2. The distinction of the use of the word "powerhouse" is important so as not to confuse the Incline Powerhouse as an electrical generation station. Technically we refer to generators individually as power plants and collectively in a building refered to as a powerhouse. But the Incline Powerhouse is specifically the building that housed the equipment that mechanically operated the incline cable cars although no electric power generation was done in that building.

3. In February of 1993, a volunteer helicopter service with a Sikorsky sky crane hoisted two of these intermediate gears from the slope of Echo Mountain back to top near the hotel steps. They purportedly weighed 3,500 pounds each and were probably sent over the side by dismantlers in the 1940's. The next week this author joined members of the Scenic Mount Lowe Railway Historical Committee in moving one of these gears, with the help of come-alongs, levers, rollers and hydraulic jacks, some 50 feet laterally to a position along side the bullwheel. With a little trenching we tipped the gear into mesh with the bullwheel cogs thereby making a more complete assembly of the monument.

4. These primitive mechanical systems predate the coil spring generally used to preload switches or brake bands. Most of the automatic devices, like the emergency brake, were "spring" operated by a series of weights, cables and pulleys. The emergency brake preload cable actually ran outside the building and up a pole in order to find enough drop room for the heavy scale weights needed to activate it automatically. Even the overspeed switch was counterwieghted into the closed position and was actuated by a centrifugal speedball, or governor assembly that would pull in the opposite direction to cut the power in case of an overspeeding condition.

5. These side-by-side photos were taken a few years apart. As the divisions were progressing, additional power stations were required. The right photo shows quite a bit of unfinished landscaping. The left picture shows a great amount of stone masonry that followed up. This stone work is still in evidence on Mt. Echo today.

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