Angels Flight: The World's Shortest Railway

Angels Flight opened on New Year's Eve, nineteen oh one, as a funicular railway connecting the lower commercial streets of Los Angeles to the Victorian residential neighborhood on Bunker Hill above. The fare was two cents. The track was three hundred fifteen feet long. It ran two cars, the Sinai and the Olivet, counterweighted so that when one went up, the other came down. It billed itself as the world's shortest railway.

For sixty-eight years, Angels Flight carried tens of millions of passengers up and down this hill. The Victorian neighborhood above it aged and declined, and by the nineteen sixties the city had decided it needed to go. The houses were cleared for the Music Center and Convention Center complex. Angels Flight was dismantled in nineteen sixty-nine and went into storage.

It came back. The funicular was rebuilt and reopened in nineteen ninety-six, then closed after a fatal accident in two thousand one, then reopened in twenty seventeen. The track is the original track. The cars are the original cars. The hill above, the one that generated sixty-eight years of daily traffic, was cleared fifty years ago. The funicular serves the Grand Central Market and the financial district now. The track is the same. The hill is not the same hill.