The rails are steel, fifty-seven pounds to the yard, laid to standard gauge upon the ordinary redwood ties in use on the Pacific coast. Grading, trestle work, and laying cost about $55,000. The entire road cost $136,746.44, or practically $16,700 per mile. The equipment consists of one thirty-ton geared locomotive (Heisler), one twenty-ton geared locomotive (Shay), six open canopy-top observation cars, one half-closed passenger car, and two flat cars. Cost of equipment, $22,450.[G] [G] The writer is indebted to the officers of the Mill Valley and Mount Tamalpais Scenic Railway for the above accurate statistics. [Illustration: VIEW FROM SUMMIT OF MOUNT TAMALPAIS HOTEL AT TERMINUS.] The locomotives and cars are very thoroughly provided with brakes: first, the Westinghouse automatic air brake; second, a water brake; and, third, a powerful hand brake to each locomotive and car. The efficiency of this equipment is attested in the operation of the road without accident or injury of any kind. The locomotives are always operated on the lower end of trains, and the maximum speed allowed is eight miles per hour. The ride up the winding cañons and through the superb scenery traversed by this road is a treat of which one never tires. The point of view, the direction, and the character of the landscape are continually changing. With no deep cuts, no tunnels, facing first one and then the other and finally all the points of the compass, sweeping around spurs, with distant views of land and sea, and near views of great beauty; then facing the steep sides of the mountain, its geology and flora affording interesting pictures; then over trestles with the branches of the bay, redwood, madroño, oak, and manzanita just out of reach--all these form beauties and attractions possessed by no other road known to the writer. A faint idea of the appearance of the road and of the scenery may be had from the appended photographs. [Illustration: THE DOUBLE BOW.] THE METEOROLOGICAL STATION.--The advantages of Mount Tamalpais as a meteorological station have long been recognized, and many efforts have been made to utilize them. It frequently projects many hundreds of feet above fogs which cover the adjacent shores, and during these periods one can look out upon an ocean of rolling, fleecy clouds which break upon the mountains around its base and visible from its summit. This freedom from obscuring conditions gives an opportunity to more freely observe and study meteorological phenomena, and caused the Weather Bureau to make a series of preliminary observations in 1897, and, these resulting favorably, a fully equipped permanent station was subsequently built. The results have fully equaled expectations. The advantages of the location may be briefly summarized as follows: