Thaddeus S.C. Lowe had already made his name generating hydrogen gas for Union Army observation balloons during the Civil War when he turned his attention to the San Gabriel Mountains. With civil engineer David Macpherson, a Cornell graduate, Lowe built what would become one of only two scenic mountain electric traction railways in the United States. The railway opened on July 4, 1893, climbing from Mountain Junction in Altadena through the Poppyfields district to Rubio Canyon. There, at the Rubio Pavilion - a platform spanning the canyon with an integrated twelve-room hotel - visitors could view eleven named waterfalls before boarding the Great Incline. The incline's grade changed three times, from a steep 62 percent at the base to a gentler 48 percent at the summit, with cars designed to adjust smoothly to each transition.

Echo Mountain became a self-contained resort complex. The 40-room Echo Chalet opened on the railway's first day; by November 1894, the 80-room Victorian Echo Mountain House rose as a luxury facility meant to rival the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego. Lowe installed a telescope and observatory, hoping to establish Mount Lowe as the astronomical center of the San Gabriels. He recruited astronomer Lewis Swift, whose reputation for discovering comets preceded him. Given the absence of light pollution, Swift discovered 95 new nebulae from the Echo Mountain vantage point. A menagerie housed lynxes, raccoons, snakes, and a black bear. Lowe piped hydrogen gas from his Pasadena plant some three miles uphill to fuel the heating and lighting systems before electricity made the technology obsolete.

Beyond Echo Mountain, the Alpine Division carried passengers across three canyons on narrow-gauge track to the foot of Mount Lowe. Limited electrical power meant only one trolley could operate at a time. The route featured a point called Cape of Good Hope, cut around a bluff, and the ironically named longest straight track - just 225 feet. At Circular Bridge, passengers looked down at a 340-degree turn negotiating a switchback over what resembled a section of roller coaster, with a view almost straight down from the side of the car. The line ended at Crystal Springs, where Ye Alpine Tavern offered tennis courts, mule rides, a silver fox farm, and a wading pool. Visitors could purchase souvenir photographs taken by official photographer Charles Lawrence from his scaffold at the incline's summit - everyone aboard the car included, of course.

Lowe's railway was never profitable. By 1898 it fell into receivership, and Congress, realizing the entire operation sat on federal land in the San Gabriel Timberland Reserve, awarded control to Jared Sidney Torrance. The Echo Mountain House burned in 1900, grossly underinsured. In 1905, a fierce wind ripped the roof from a newly built casino, hurling it onto the power station and igniting a fire that razed everything except the observatory. A 1909 flash flood destroyed the Rubio Pavilion and buried a caretaker's child in mud; three siblings who knew how to operate the incline cars escaped to the summit. In 1928, Santa Ana winds collapsed the observatory; curator Charles Lawrence barely escaped alive but had wisely packed the expensive lenses beforehand. The instrument now resides at Santa Clara University.

The Mount Lowe Tavern, rebuilt with a brick annex in 1925, burned from an electrical fire in September 1936. Two years later, floods washed railway property off the mountainsides, and the line was officially abandoned. Over its 45 years, an estimated three million people had ridden the railway. Henry Ford visited in 1922 and returned with a Hollywood film crew to document the journey; that footage survives at the Library of Congress. Today, hikers can trace the old right-of-way past concrete foundations, rusting wheel assemblies, and the bull wheel salvaged from the Incline Powerhouse before its 1962 demolition. The railway was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1993, exactly a century after its opening day, with the listing expanded in 2015. Echo Mountain's ruins mark where birthday searchlights once swept across the basin and astronomers discovered nebulae in unpolluted darkness.