The Incline Railway and the Steepest Mile in America

From the St. Elmo neighborhood at the base of Lookout Mountain, a cable car has been making the climb to the summit since eighteen ninety-five. The Lookout Mountain Incline Railway is about one mile long, standard gauge, and at its steepest section the grade reaches seventy-two point seven percent. That makes it one of the steepest passenger railways in the world.

The engineering at that gradient is not intuitive. The cars are built so that the floors remain level relative to passengers even as the car climbs at an angle that would make most vehicles simply slide backward. The railway obtained Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark designation from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in nineteen ninety-one.

The upper station, near Point Park at the summit, overlooks the Tennessee River valley and the city spread below it. The view from the observation deck encompasses the same landscape that both armies tried to control in November of eighteen sixty-three, Moccasin Bend in the river, the flat of the valley, Missionary Ridge in the middle distance. Union General Hooker's troops climbed this mountain on foot through fog, fighting as they went. The railway offers the same five-hundred-foot vertical rise in roughly ten minutes, without the combat.

The Incline has been running continuously, more or less, for over a century. It carries more than a hundred thousand riders a year. The nineteenth-century engineers who calculated the cable tensions and built the sheave wheels into the mountainside got it right the first time.